If you had any any doubts concerning popularity of the iOS 7 which caused – and continues to cause – quite a commotion among the punditry with its light design, here’s your wake up call. According to Apple’s official data, iOS 7 is now installed on more than three-quarters of iOS devices in active use.
Specifically, Apple’s data indicates a 74 percent adoption rate for iOS 7 as of December 1. Apple released iOS 7 on September 18, 2013.
The 74 percent iOS 7 adoption rate is a huge share no matter how you look at it, especially versus the 22 percent seen by iOS 6. The company put the older iOS versions at just four percent.
By comparison, Android 4.4 KitKat is currently installed on a meager 1.1 percent of Android devices. That the iPhone maker has been able to put iOS 7 on three out of each four devices in the wild in less than three months iOS 7 has been on the market is nothing short of phenomenal…
As measured by the App Store during a seven‑day period ending December 1, 74 percent of iPhones, iPads and iPods in the wild were using iOS 7. To put it bluntly, three out of each four iOS devices you see in active use today run Apple’s latest and controversial mobile operating system.
Apple’s official numbers have been corroborated by ad network Chitika, which on Wednesday posted its analysis of iOS device Internet traffic that found iOS 7 installed on 74.1 percent of devices during the three-week period between October 25 and November 18, versus 22.4 percent for iOS.
Interestingly enough, Chitika found that nine percent of iPads in active use were still using iOS 5. The numbers indicate that iPhone and iPad users update at extremely high rates, Chitika noted.
“While still-active legacy devices make it unlikely for iOS 7 adoption to substantially surpass the nearly 90 percent adoption rate of iOS 6, the latest operating system will likely reach that point in a much quicker timeframe than its forerunner,” the ad firm noted.
At the same time, Google’s Android continues to suffer from device  fragmentation, although the Internet giant has moved to solve the ongoing issue with the recent release of Android 4.4 KitKat, which was designed to run smoothly on lower-specc’d hardware.
Here’s a snapshot of the Android version distribution by Google.
Google’s data was collected during a seven-day period ending on December 2, 2013.
Please note that Google only counts devices that access its Play store, which rules out forked Android builds such as Amazon’s Kindle.
More importantly, Google’s data doesn’t take into account a vast army of dirt cheap devices by no-name Chinese vendors that don’t come preloaded with Google services at all and thereby are unable to run the Play store.
Is iOS 7 installed on your devices?