According to Apple, 85 percent of iPhone, iPod touch and iPad devices run iOS 7

iOS 7 teaser (iPhone 5c ad 007)

Apple on Monday refreshed iOS usage numbers, publicly available via the App Store Distribution section of its portal for developers. As measured by the App Store during a seven‑day period ending March 23, 2014, 85 percent of iPhone, iPod touch and iPad devices in the wild were on iOS 7 or later.

Twelve percent of devices, or about one out of each eight iOS devices, are running iOS 6, with just three percent of active devices having remained stuck on older versions of Apple’s mobile operating system…

You can check out the stats yourself here.

iOS usage stats (20140324)

To put the latest stats in context, Apple o December 6, 2013 said that iOS adoption hit the 74 percent mark. As a reminder, Apple released iOS 7 on September 18, 2013.

And on January 27, 2014, 80 percent of iOS devices were on iOS 7. That only an additional five percent of device owners have upgraded to iOS 7 in nearly two months could be a sign of a slowdown in iOS 7 adoption.

The slowdown of course is to be expected as it’s been six months since iOS 7 debuted. One needs look no further than Google’s official Android version distribution.

Screen Shot 2014-03-24 at 20.47.25

Based on data collected during a seven-day period ending on March 3, 2014, 62 percent of devices that accessed Play Store had Android Jelly Bean installed and 35.5 percent were on earlier releases.

Just 2.5 percent devices ran Android KitKat, the latest and greatest version of Android.

Some caveats from Google:

Because this data is gathered from the new Google Play Store app, which supports Android 2.2 and above, devices running older versions are not included.

However, in August, 2013, versions older than Android 2.2 accounted for about one percent of devices that checked in to Google servers (not those that actually visited Google Play Store).

Regardless, Google’s platform has always lagged behind iOS in terms of OS and device fragmentation and the latest stats exemplify the fact.

It should be noted that Apple is also making updates easy by delivering firmware upgrades over the air and requiring that both new app submissions and updates to existing apps be compiled against iOS 7.