iOS versions market share in November 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. In November 2023, iOS 17 has more than one third market share, and iOS 16 is still used by a bit more than half of iOS devices.

If you develop an app for iOS, I'd recommend setting your minimum deployment target to iOS 16 unless you have really good reasons not to.

In this article, iOS also includes iPadOS.

More than a third of iOS devices are running iOS 17

The most used version of iOS is still 16.6, running on around 35% of all iOS devices. 57% of devices are still running some versio of iOS 16. And around 39% 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 small 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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39% iOS 17, 57% iOS 16, the rest is negligible

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

• iOS 17: 38.92%, up from 33.82% last month
• iOS 16: 57.07, down from 61.83% last month
• iOS 15: 3.94%
• iOS 14: 0.07%
• Other

More and more users are switching over to iOS 17. The overwhelming majority of iOS and iPadOS users use either version 16 or version 17.

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

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. 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 stays like that until shortly before the introduction of the new version's betas.

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 2496 apps we manage and around 3.9 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: