At WWDC when Apple unveiled iOS 9 one of the features they highlighted was a reduction in the upgrade free space requirement from 4.6GB to 1.3GB.
I love improvements like this. They help drive quick adoption of the new OS by my customers. Which in turn lets me more quickly drop support for older platforms and focus on the new stuff.
I was curious, though, as to how much of an impact this reduction would have in practice. So using the dataset I have from my Audiobooks app I took at look at how many of my customers have enough space for the upgrade.
The result was pretty promising.
66% of my customers on eligible devices have at least 1.3GB of free space. This compares to just 37% of users who would have immediately had sufficient space at the old iOS 8 requirement.
The distribution of eligible devices breaks out roughly as you’d expect for the various capacities Apple sells:
The rate for the 16GB devices (54%) is higher than I would have initially feared. The 16GB capacity accounts for 58% of devices, so it is vitally important that its users have the ability to upgrade.
This reduction in the space requirement (and other things Apple is doing on this front) make me think iOS 9 adoption to be even faster than iOS 8’s. I’m starting to feel much more comfortable with being aggressive about dropping iOS 8 support and fully embracing the new stuff in iOS 9.