iOS versions market share in December 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 December 2023, iOS 16 and 17 have switched: iOS 17 is now at almost two-thirds market share, and iOS 16 at one-third.

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.

65% iOS 17, 33% iOS 16, the rest is negligible

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

• iOS 17: 63.2%, up from 38.92% last month
• iOS 16: 33.0%, down from 57.07,% last month
• iOS 15: 3.7%
• iOS 14: 0.06%
• Other

The overwhelming majority of iOS and iPadOS users use either version 16 or version 17.

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

The majority of devices are now running iOS 17

The most used version of iOS is now 17.1, running on around 55% of all iOS devices. 65% of devices are running some version of iOS 17. And around 33% of devices are running iOS 16.

What a reversal! Only one month ago, iOS 16 was still running on two-thirds of all iOS devices, and now the two have reversed! What has changed?

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

iOS Adoption rate is STEEP now

Apple have flicked some sort of switch that's making everyone switch to the new iOS now. I assume that some sort of automatic update setting is now a bit more aggressive than before.

That, or maybe all the iPhones that proudly proclaim every evening that they're going to perform an update tonight are finally actually doing it :D~

Either way, we're seeing a distinct S-curve in the adoption, something that we haven't seen in the adoption of last years' iOS 16. This is pretty cool and it shows the commitment that Apple is making to having as many people as possible on the newes operating system. Great news for developers.

Look, new iMac!

We're seeing an absolutely incredible influx of signals from the new M3 iMacs. Our macOS data is not as representative as our iOS data, but it's still absolutely fascinating to see just how much that number jumped within just a few days after the release of these machines. People are rightfully loving them!

Everyone is running the new macOS

At least in the TelemetryDeck data set, macOS Sonoma aka macOS 14 is the vastly preferred version of macOS, with almost three-fourths of users running the newest operating system.

This shows that Mac users are fearlessly upgrading. Years ago, many Mac users would wait a while for the new version of macOS to settle down and fix various bugs, but not anymore – Apple's macOS releases tend to be rock solid and stable from day one, so people trust them a lot – even I as a developer upgraded as soon as possible.

The first glimpse at iOS 18

Every now and then, a stray iOS 18 signal lands in our database. We've looked at a few of them, and they mostly appear genuine, either sent from actual devices running iOS 18 or from beta builds of VisionOS masquerading as iOS 18.

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 2587 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: