iOS versions market share in October 2023

Every month I take a look at the TelemetryDeck data set and compile the most helpful insights about the ecosystem in a blog post like this. At the beginning of October, iOS 17 has about one third market share, and iOS 16 is still used by two thirds of iOS devices. To be honest, this surprised me a bit, so I compared it to iOS 16's launch last year.

Unless you have really good reasons not to do so, I'd recommend setting your minimum deployment target to iOS 16.

A third of iOS devices are running iOS 17

The most used version of iOS is still 16.6, running on around 40% of all iOS devices. Over 60% of devices are still running some verison of iOS 16. And around 33% of devices are running iOS 17.

iOS 17, previewed in the iPhone Event on September 9 and released to the public on September 19, has had a very quick adoption. In addition, a considerable number of users have opted to upgrade their devices to iOS 16.7, a point release that came out around the same time.

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Is iOS 17 rolling out too slowly?

When I talk to my friends and relatives who use iPhones, everyone has updated to the new version yet. I would raise an eyebrow when someone hasn't updated their phone or iPad. Yet, the data clearly shows that iOS 17 users are still a minority. Is this worrisome?

To answer this, I pulled up data from the iOS 16 launch, a year ago. Here's 12 months of iOS major versions, starting with the launch of iOS 16:

Just from looking at the chart, it becomes fairly evident that this rollout speed is normal for major iOS releases. There's a very quick jump to about 1/3 of users, and then a slow, climb that takes about half a year to hit more than 90%, which it keeps until shortly before the introduction of the new version's betas.

1/3 iOS 17, 2/3 iOS 16, the rest is negligible

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

• iOS 17: 33.82%
• iOS 16: 61.83%
• iOS 15: 4.27%
• iOS 14: 0.07%
• Other

The overwhelming majority of iPhones and iPads are running iOS 16, but now they're running slightly newer versions. We're beginning to see developers installing and testing iOS 17 on their development devices and the author if this article is only barely resisting installing the beta on his carry phone.

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

People are starting to use the iPhones 15

We're beginning to see the iPhone 15 models appear in the dataset, which is cool. Also curious: last year's iPhone 14 Pro Max had the internal identifier iPhone15,3. This year's iPhone 15 has the identifer iPhone15,4. Contrast this with this year's iPhone 15 Pro which has the internal identifier iPhone 16,1.

This checks out with the fact that the only the new iPhone 15 Pro Models are using the new "A17 Pro" chip, whereas the non-pro versions are using last year's "A16 Bionic" version of the chip.

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 2355 apps we manage and around 3.7 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: