iOS versions market share in March 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 3.9 billion data points in TelemetryDeck's data set at my fingertips.

In March 2024, four in five iPhones are running iOS 17, and the rest are basically all running iOS 16. Subscribe to our newsletter to never miss any updates to these articles.

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. I would also recommend measuring your personal iOS market share by integrating TelemetryDeck into your app for free.

In this article, iOS also includes iPadOS.

81% iOS 17, 16% iOS 16, the rest is negligible

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

• iOS 17: 80.9%, up from 78.8% in February
• iOS 16: 16.1%, down from 18.0% in February
• iOS 15: 2.9%
• iOS 14: 0.05%
• 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.

As is customary at around this time of the year, most people who wanted to and could update to iOS 17 have already done so. That means it's market share is not making any dramatic changes, and I expect this to stay until around June, when the first people outside of Apple are going to switch to iOS 18.

If you want a breakdown of OS versions for your app specifically, let me encourage you to try out TelemetryDeck for free right now.

iOS 17.3 is running on most iOS and iPadOS devices

The most used version of iOS is now 17.3, running on around 63% of all iOS devices. The unreleased version 17.4, which is still in beta, is already being used by one and a half percent of our users, which is more than usual. I assume this is because developers are running this to prepare for the massive changes iOS 17.4 will bring to App Stores, browser, and other technologies in the European Union.

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

iOS 18 is ramping up

The number of iOS 18 devices in our dataset is continuing to ramp up, showing that people inside Apple are beginning to use the unreleased OS on their carry phones and installing third-party apps. I think that's pretty cool, and I can't wait to see what's new in that version.

Apple has sold around 200,000 Visions Pro

Acording to MacRumors, around 200,000 Vision Pro headsets were sold to customers since the launch in Februar.

(In a previous version of this blog post, the data in the following chart was not updated and only showed data for January. This has been corrected.)

Around 1500 of those have shown up in the TelemetryDeck data set, showing that we're represented in one way or another on a bit less than one percent of the headsets out there.

This is way more representation than on iPhones and iPads, so that's really cool. It also tracks with the assumption that a lot of people who bought a Vision Pro right now are probably tech enthusiasts who will try out a lot of apps.

That and a lot of Vision Pro apps are made by Indie Developers (see our Shoutout to Vision Pro Apps), and we love being a part of the indie dev community!

Keep in mind that our data only includes apps that are using the TelemetryDeck Swift SDK (which supports Vision Pro 100%).

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 2995 apps we manage and around 9.5 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: