In its iOS 6.1 press release today, Apple disclosed some impressive usage numbers for iOS 6 and the iOS platform. As of today, nearly 300 million iOS devices -- iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch -- are running iOS 6, with nine billion photos uploaded to Photo Stream, 450 billion iMessages sent and over four trillion notifications received.
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Of these, perhaps the most impressive is that 300 million devices are currently running iOS 6. That is, as EdibleApple points out, roughly 60 percent of all iOS devices ever sold:
During Apple’s most recent earnings call, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that Apple to date has sold over 500 million iOS devices. If we put those pieces together we see that over half of every iOS device ever sold is now running the most recent version of Apple’s mobile operating system. Contrast that of course to Android where a scant minority of users are ever caught running the most recent iteration of Android.
The Next Web notes that Apple sold some 75 million iOS devices in the December quarter alone, all of which are running iOS 6, plus 100 million upgrades to iOS 6 in its first week of availability back in September.
Apple has clearly been successful in keeping devices upgraded to the latest version of iOS, particularly through the over-the-air update feature that was introduced last year in iOS 5. This keeps iOS devices secure, and keeps users up to date with the latest new features to come out of Cupertino.
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Contrast that of course to Android where a scant minority of users are ever caught running the most recent iteration of Android.
They probably just cant find the right download link, for the right provider, for the right version of phone they are using and after they confirmed that the version in question is approved by the various providers of cell service.
Man, I love this Open OS stuff! :D
If only it was ''all'' the latest features...
Well there seems to be about 299,999,000 people that don't come on macrumors and complain about it.
:eek:
And people say Android is fragmented!?!
Android is fragmented. :apple:
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Clean up the GUI, better keyboard (i.e. Swype), Haptic feedback for starters.
I could go on.
OMG are you kidding me? GUI is way better than androids. So is keyboard. Apparently you dont know how the iPhone keyboard works in the background. Haptic feedback is useless.
What counts, is that Apple can use these ambiguous numbers to put in a chart to brag about in their press conferences. And what about the developers of Apple products? They used to have to make only one app for the iPhone, now you have the 4/4S resolution, 5 resolution, iPad Mini/iPad 2 resolution and iPad 4 resolution. Plus like I said, not all products have the same features, yet it's all gathered under the same name. That's also fragmentation, but Apple doesn't seem to admit it.
Why would anyone care about these numbers if not in the context of app development?Obviously Apple brags about them to show that iOS is (still) a huge market for developers. The fact that the 3GS/4 can't do panoramas or Siri doesn't change anything about that. (If anything, it means more sales for panorama apps).
I like how you tried to make the screen issue bigger than it is. There's really only 3 screens form factors to target on iOS, as retina versions run on non-retina displays without any additional work.
1 - 960x640 (works on 480x320 displays without modification)
2 - 1136x640 (doesn't take really much more work than 960x640 as it can use the same icons/assets)
3 - 2048x1536 (works on 1024x768 displays without modification)
Having 3 different screen formats to target is nothing compared to dealing with APIs from multiple OS versions. Do you know anything about mobile development? OS updates are more than user-end features.