If you have a newer iOS device and you haven’t yet upgraded to iOS 11, you should know that you’re in an ever-dwindling group. Apple’s iPhone 8 (and the yet-to-be-launch iPhone X) come with iOS 11 pre-installed, but as with all iOS update rollouts, iOS 11 is also being installed on older devices at a brisk pace. The current percentage of iOS 11 users is nearly 25%, and since the update has only been available for about a week, that’s obviously an incredible feat.
But what the 25% figure doesn’t fully reveal is how Apple’s mobile operating system compares to its primary competitor, Android, in terms of user adoption. If we want to compare apples to apples, iOS 11’s Android counterpart would be Oreo. Oreo has only rolled out for a handful of devices, and as such it doesn’t even show up on Google’s platform tracking chart, so there’s really no comparison that can even be made.
Looking farther back, we can use Android Nougat — which was officially released in August of 2016 — instead. Remember, iOS 11 has only been out for a week, and currently has nearly 25% adoption among iOS devices. The year-old Android Nougat has less than 16% adoption among Android devices. Android Marshmallow, now roughly two years old, boasts double the number of users at 32.2%, while Lollipop comes in at 28.8%.
In fact, if you want to find an Android version that has a comparable percentage of adopters to Nougat you’ll have to look as far back as Android Kitkat, which has a little over 15% share. That’s a whole lot of fragmentation.
