iOS versions market share in February 2024

Every month, I take a look at the TelemetryDeck data set and compile the most helpful insights about the Apple operating system ecosystem in a blog post like this. Why? Because I can! I've developed apps for iOS ever since the App Store opened, I have statistics knowledge, and I have all of TelemetryDeck's data at my fingertips.

In February 2024, four in five iPhones are running iOS 17, and the rest are basically all running iOS 16.

If you develop an app for iOS, I would strongly recommend setting your minimum deployment target to iOS 16 unless you have really good reasons to choose an earlier version. This way you're catching over 96% of the available market and still have a lot of new APIs available for development.

In this article, iOS also includes iPadOS. Also, there's a slight change in how we calculate these percentages. Previously, some of our calculations were based on the number of signals we've received. We've now switched all calculations to be percentages of the number of users we have instead.

78% iOS 17, 18% iOS 16, the rest is negligible

As of February 2024, these are the market shares of major iOS versions in the TelemetryDeck data set:

• iOS 17: 78.8%, up from 63.2% last December
• iOS 16: 18.0%, down from 33.0% last December
• iOS 15: 3.1%
• iOS 14: 0.06%
• Other

The overwhelming majority of iOS and iPadOS users use version 17, with version 16 a distant second.

iOS 14 and 15 are now a negligibly small percentage of the TelemetryDeck data set.

iOS 17.2 is running on most iOS and iPadOS devices

The most used version of iOS is now 17.2, running on around 59% of all iOS devices. The newly released 17.3 is already at 12%, and there are a few adventurous souls who are running the 17.4 beta.

Find out just how quickly people are adopting iOS 17 by subbing to our newsletter.

iOS 17 had another boost

Last time we looked at this data, iOS 17 was already in the majority. But now, just over the course of a few weeks, iOS 17 market share rose steeply again. This is different than the smooth adoption curve that iOS 16 had last year, leading me to the assumption that Apple is finding ways of pushing users to upgrade more quickly.

Either way, it's great news for developers who can base their apps of ever-newer operating systems, and for customers who can be reasonably sure the Apple devices they buy will get updates for a long time.

Let's look into Vision Pro 🤓

I am really excited to see how many Vision Pro devices we'll see in the next few weeks. Today, shortly before the launch, we're seeing just a handful of testers.

Keep in mind that our data only includes apps that are using the TelemetryDeck Swift SDK (which supports Vision Pro 100%). I imagine the bump we're seeing in the last few days is people like Joanna Stern of the WSJ or Nilay Patel of The Verge or Scott Stein of CNET working on their reviews and installing lots of cool apps.

Also in that bump will be App Store reviewers reviewing your very apps that you already uploaded before the launch on Feb 2.

iOS 18 is getting busy too

We're seeing more and more devices with iOS 18 in the dataset as well. This is great news, because it shows Apple is busy working and preparing a beta release for WWDC in January. Just as with Vision Pro, we're only seeing devices with third party apps in this query, so there might be a few people in Cupertino with iOS 18 as their daily driver. I'm sure they'll stay away from bars though.

Thanks for keeping your SDK version updated

We regularly update the TelemetryDeck Swift SDK with new versions that include additional data, compatibilty with new platforms and, yes, bug fixes and performance improvements.

It's fantastic to see that most of the signals we see are sending from at least version 1.5.0, so that most of the data is using a very new version. To find out how to update your version of TelemetryDeck SDK, check out our handy guide on updating Swift Packages.

Biases in the TelemetryDeck data set

• Our data set currently skews towards small and independent developers, who in turn tend to have more technically minded users.
• The oldest iOS version our SDK supports is iOS 12, so we have no data before that.
• We use the aggregated data from the 2849 apps we manage and around 9.2 million monthly active users. These charts will be more accurate as we grow.
• Our data set is mostly American and European apps – things might look different in other regions. Below is a chart of our combined locales: