iOS 6 has only been out for just over a month ago, and according to Chitika the operating system has an adoption rate of approximately 61 percent in North America. Comparatively, Google’s 4.0.3 Android operating system, codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS), has only been hovering around 23.7 percent.
Apple’s always had customers that are savvy enough to know that they need to be patching their systems. On the flip side, Android’s poor ICS update ratio probably has a lot more to do with telcos failing to allow certain phones to upgrade to the new operating system, and other tomfoolery. I mean, just today there’s word that not all of the Droid Bionic users have been able to update to Ice Cream Sandwich just yet. Add those problems to the fact that a large number of handsets don’t even support ICS yet, and you’ve got a recipe for low adoption rate.
Another case in point? Windows 7 adoption rates hovered around 40 percent and Apple’s Snow Leopard, which shipped around the same time, hit 68 percent adoption rate. We should also point out that Lion did considerably worse than Snow Leopard, and that Mountain Lion appears to be doing significantly better since its release.