iOS 18 saw below average adoption despite Apple Intelligence

AppleInsider

While the figures are close, Apple's announced adoption rate for iOS 18 puts it just below the average for the last decade's releases -- even though Apple Intelligence was supposed to boost its popularity.

Apple introducing features of iOS 18 in 2024 -- image credit: Apple

By January 2025, iOS 18 appeared to be ahead of its predecessor, reaching 76% of all compatible iPhones a month before iOS 17 did the year before. Even that figure was perhaps surprisingly low, however, since Tim Cook had announced vastly faster upgrading at the start in October 2024.

"[This is a] really early stat, which is only three days worth of data," he said at the time, "but users are adopting iOS 18.1 at twice the rate that they adopted 17.1 in the year ago quarter."

"It's a combination that 15 was stronger than 14 in the year... and 16 was stronger than 15," he continued. "Plus, keep in mind that the 15 Pro and Pro Max also run Apple Intelligence."

Now Apple has announced what is expected to be its final account of iOS 18 adoption. The company says that iOS 18 is currently installed on 82% of all compatible iPhones.

Comparing ten years of iOS

In announcing that figure, Apple said that this adoption rate is down to its users being aware of the benefits of updating, plus how simple the company has made it to update.

Comparing Apple's own figures from the last ten years, however, iOS 18 comes in at just under the average of 83.2%. The specific figures from 2015's iOS 8 to 2025's iOS 18 for all compatible iPhones are:

• 2015 iOS 8: 84%


• 2016 iOS 9: 84%


• 2017 iOS 10: 86%


• 2018 iOS 11: 81%


• 2019 iOS 12: 87%


• 2020 iOS 13: 81%


• 2021 iOS 14: 90%


• 2022 iOS 15: 82%


• 2023 iOS 16: 81%


• 2024 iOS 17: 77%


• 2025 iOS 18: 82%

So in the last decade, iOS 14 saw the highest adoption rate with 90%. Then iOS 17 scored the lowest with 77%.

These figures were taken from Apple's own listings on its developer.apple.com site, which periodically measures adoption rate through user access of the App Store. Over the decade, the most comparable measurements were recorded at various dates from late May to mid-June.

Apple splits out adoption rates into two sets

Apple does not publish further detail such as the adoption of point releases like 18.1, 18.2, and so on. However, since 2019, the company has separately recorded the iOS adoption rate for iPhones released in the previous four years.

It's not clear why it introduced this, or why it chose four years, but the figures do not materially help iOS 18's case.

Using only this last-four-years data from Apple in 2019, the average adoption rate is 87.9%. That means iOS 18's figure of 88% is just 0.1% above the average.

The minimum adoption rate during this period and for this range of iPhones is 85%, which was achieved by both iOS 12 and iOS 14. The maximum was 92% for iOS 13.

Curiously, across these six years, the latest iPhones did not always saw a greater rate of adoption than that for all iPhones. In 2021, iOS 14's rate for these latest iPhones was 5% lower than all iPhones, at 85%. In 2019, iOS 12 was 2% behind all iPhones, also at 85%.

The complete list of Apple's figures for "all devices introduced in the last four years," since the company released such data, is:

• 2019 iOS 12: 85%


• 2020 iOS 13: 92%


• 2021 iOS 14: 85%


• 2022 iOS 15: 89%


• 2023 iOS 16: 90%


• 2024 iOS 17: 86%


• 2025 iOS 18: 88%

Overall, iOS adoption rate for all compatible devices is reasonably steady, having never fallen below 77% in the last ten years, and never rising above 90%.

By comparison, figures from Talk Android in May 2025 claim that only 4.5% of Android phones are on the latest OS.



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daalseth

iOS 18 saw below average adoption despite Apple Intelligence

Or maybe because of.

xyzzy01

" below average adoption despite Apple Intelligence" - maybe because of it? After all, Apple Intelligence has pretty much been a failure - the headlines it has generated was making up fake headlines and the Siri fiasco.  I've yet to see any news about Apple Intelligence being useful.

And in addition, Apple Intelligence is only available in a couple of markets, in a couple of languages. Thus, many of us would have even less reason to upgrade as there wasn't a lot of other things in that underwhelming iOS release.

massiveattack

My interpretation is that many people don’t care about AI or Apple Intelligence (=Incompetency) as of today. And most people many upgrade to iOS 18 because the update is informed and displayed on your screen so that people think they have to.

People don’t upgrade because of AI, but because of hardware designs. 

iPhone 17 air looks promising with colors which could be a hot selling product. 

AI has not entered the mass market yet. Apple hastily has time to catch up and to fix the mess

apple4thewin

I have a friend who didn’t even know her phone needed to update until one day a month ago. I was helping her, and I noticed that Control Center was still from iOS 17. I went to Settings and saw Auto Update was on, but it never decided to update even with a ton of free storage available. I manually updated it for her, but imagine how many people think their device is up to date until they one day check their settings. Also was part of the reason why some apps were not working properly.

decoderring

I came to write what’s already been said —  AI is probably at this point more of a turn off for most people or at least a reason for caution.

I’d love a fork of Apple’s OSs devoid of AI.

williamlondon

DAalseth said:

iOS 18 saw below average adoption despite Apple Intelligence

Or maybe because of.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

chock_mossley

DAalseth said:

iOS 18 saw below average adoption despite Apple Intelligence

Or maybe because of.

I know more than a few people that purposely held off on updating to 18 because of the AI push, because they don’t trust it. I know my wife didn’t want to update until I showed her that you could opt out, which I made sure to always opt out

chock_mossley

And I see my comment immediately got a dislike. God forbid I say something bad about AI. Sorry, not a fan of something that has famously been trained on intellectual theft, something that is horribly environmentally damaging. I know Apple has been trying to do things differently when it comes to that, but AI is so unethical on so many levels as we’ve seen it so far. Which is why I have zero qualms with Apple struggling on putting out their AI products. The only good thing that came out of it is we finally have the base level Macs shipping with 16GB of RAM

dewme

By including only the last four (4) releases you captured what was probably an outlier in iOS14 at 90%.

I came up with a mean of 83.3 by including all ten (10) previous releases.

This means iOS 18 was only 1.3% lower than the average (mean) of the past ten (10) years.

I'd bet that if you look at the average in conjunction with the number of iOS devices that were upgradable to iOS18 for each of the past ten (10) years you would find that the number of upgradable iOS devices upgraded per year has only increased.

Nobody at Apple is losing a millisecond of sleep over this "below average" assessment.

Nothing to see here.

9secondkox2

AI isn't the end-all, be all. Apple stuff works so great, users generally don't need AI. But it's a nice little bonus. 

decoderring

Chock_Mossley said:

And I see my comment immediately got a dislike. God forbid I say something bad about AI. Sorry, not a fan of something that has famously been trained on intellectual theft, something that is horribly environmentally damaging. I know Apple has been trying to do things differently when it comes to that, but AI is so unethical on so many levels as we’ve seen it so far. Which is why I have zero qualms with Apple struggling on putting out their AI products. The only good thing that came out of it is we finally have the base level Macs shipping with 16GB of RAM

I really dislike it for all of the same reasons. Thank you for sharing!

anantksundaram

“Apple Intelligence”.

This phrase will soon be added to the Hall of Fame of Oxymorons. 

mplsp

My suspicion is that, while there may be some people who specifically don’t want AI, there are far more who are simply ambivalent and when it’s touted as the big new feature the response is a big “Meh. If that’s all I’m getting, why should I upgrade?”

Count me among them. I haven’t found a big use for AI in my life. I guess it helps kids cheat by having it write their essays, and the folks at the Apple store love to gush about how it can edit your photos for you but I’ve found little use for it in my life.