iOS versions market share in June 2023

Every month I take a gander at the TelemetryDeck data set and compile the most helpful insights about the ecosystem in a blog post like this. At the beginning of 🏳️‍🌈 Pride Month, let's have a look at the market shares of various major and minor version of Apple's iOS operating system, which models are most prevalent, and look out to the upcoming iOS 17 and the mysterious headset!

iOS 16.5 is out and percolating

After a relatively short beta period, iOS 16.5 has been released to the public and has reached around 12% of all iPhones running any version of iOS 16.

While you'd expect this to be the last version of iOS 16 before the upcoming iOS 17 announcement, iOS version 16.6 is available for members of the iOS beta program and contains no major new features so far.

Almost all iPhones are running iOS 16

As of June 1, 2023, these are the market shares of major iOS versions in the TelemetryDeck data set:

• iOS 16: 93.0% (+1,3)
• iOS 15: 6.7% (-1.3)
• iOS 14: 0.1% (-0.1)
• Other: 0.1% (–)

Nothing really changed compared to our last Orbital Survey: the overwhelming majority of iPhones and iPads are running iOS 16. We'll begin to see this change when laypeople and developers inevitably install the iOS 17 beta on their devices. (Our recommendation: don't install the beta on your carry phone! It's not worth the hassle.)

iOS 14 is now a negligibly small percentage of the TelemetryDeck data set, and iOS 15 is now pretty unimportant as well.

If you develop an app, you might consider setting iOS 16 as your minimun deployment target over the summer.

iOS 17 is almost here

Because Apple is internally testing apps on their development builds and test devices, we can see whenever they do more testing. As we're nearing WWDC next week, more devices running iOS 17 are entering the data set. This is not surprising, but it is pretty cool to see.

We expect an iOS beta launch for WWDC on June 5, 2023, and the final launch in September 2023, as is customary.

The VR headset is coming

Apple is heavily expected to debut a mixed-reality headset next Monday at its annual WWDC conference.

I did have a look through our dataset searching for "xrOS" and "realityOS", possible rumored operating system names. I also looked for signals containing the "wolf" platform, another rumored codename.

The image that presented itself is a bit unclear. There are a few signals that might fit, and there were a few that seemed as if Apple might try to disguise the headset in our data set. All in all, there are orders of magnitude less "potential headset" signals than there are iOS 17 signals.

If I had to speculate, I would say this: the headset is coming, but its operating system will take a little while longer before it is actually usable and available to the public.

It could also be that it doesn't run any iOS apps at the moment, but that would go against various other rumours out there. We'll have a clearer image next week.

The iPhone 11 is the most used iPhone model right now

Right now, 16% of all iPhones in the TelemetryDeck data set are iPhones 11, followed by the iPhone 13 at 11%.

In general, more people seem to use a non-Pro iPhone than a Pro iPhone, and more people use the regular size than use the Max versions. A surprising amount of people is using iPhones mini – good news for fans of the small size.

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 1906 apps we manage and around 3 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 over time: