If it was hard to download iOS 7 yesterday, that's because millions upon millions of other owners of iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches were trying to update their operating systems at the same time. This may be an annoyance, but it's good for Apple: after just a day and a half of iOS 7's availability, over 40 percent of Apple mobile users have already adopted the new operating system.
That figure comes from MixPanel (via Fortune), which tracked the rise of iOS 7 (and subsequent fall of iOS 6) over the last few dozen hours. As the chart shows, by midday Thursday, September 19, iOS 7 is the new operating system of over 41 percent of Apple users. As a consequence, iOS 6 has plummeted from being the operating system for over 93 percent of Apple iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch users, to just over 50 percent, and it's falling fast.
That not only signifies how popular the new operating system is, but speaks to the lack of fragmentation of the Apple OS environment - though ironically, the release of iOS 7 has (at least temporarily) led to more fragmentation.
Meanwhile, Android still has fragmentation issues, though Google updated its figures at the beginning of the month, and things are getting better. According to Google's Android developer's blog, over 45 percent of Android users now have some version of Android Jelly Bean (4.1 or above). But a large number of Android handsets still lag behind, with over 30 percent still running Android Gingerbread, an operating system that is now 2 years old.
Of course, part of the reason why Google's mobile operating system is so much more fragmented than Apples is due to Android's nature - different manufacturers create a myriad of different devices with varying specs and features. On top of that, many of these manufacturers, like HTC, Samsung, and LG, create their own user interface that runs on top of Android, leading to slower updates whenever Google releases a new version. Finally, Android devices can be cheap. So cheap that they don't have the kind of support for, or ability to, update to the latest Android system.
Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook didn't pass up a chance to take a victory lap over Android's fragmentation issues, as opposed to the general uniformity of Apple devices' in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek on Thursday. "I don't think of Android as one thing," said Cook. Because of Android's fragmentation, often the most popular operating systems are, "not the latest ones by the time people buy," as Cook put it. "And so by the time they exit, they're using an operating system that's three or four years old. That would be like me right now having in my pocket iOS 3. I can't imagine it."
While it takes Google support systems a lot of effort, planning, and intelligence to keep the menagerie of Android devices and operating systems functional, it also takes a lot to support the humongous updates that Apple users crave en masse. According to Fortune's number crunchers, Apple is supporting roughly 100 million downloads of the new iOS 7 - or about 6.3 million per hour. Because the iOS 7 upgrade is about 1.2 to 1.3GB, depending on your device, that's about 2.2 terabytes per second. iOS 7 adoption will probably surpass 50 percent during the weekend, so If the internet breaks in the next couple of days, you'll know whom to blame.