Apple's latest software update to its mobile devices, iOS 7, has been widely accepted by the existing iOS community with the company's app store reporting that the software has been downloaded onto a majority of existing Apple mobile devices in the two and a half months since its launch.
The latest figures from the company show iOS versions running on devices connecting to the App Store in the week ending on Dec. 1. Roughly 74 percent of iPhones, iPods and iPads are working with iOS 7 with 22 percent using iOS 6 and four percent using an earlier version. iOS 7 has increased ten percent since Oct. alone.
Clearly the bold new redesign inspired by Apple's Jon Ive has been a success as a majority of Apple's loyal fans have taken to the software with minimal complaints and a great deal of ease.
As ZDNet points out, this should be good news for app developers who need to consider device compatibility when working with different APIs built into iOS 6 and iOS 7.
By contrast, developers building for Android are confronted with a very different distribution of users. The latest os update, Android 4.4 KitKat, has only 1.1 percent of all users have it. This isn't surprising as the 4.4. update hasn't reached all users other than the Nexus 5 models which came out Oct. 31.
"Meanwhile, Jelly Bean 4.3, which was released in July, was now on 4.2 percent of Android devices. Although Jelly Bean (4.1 to 4.3) is the most widely used OS at just over 50 percent, there are still five main versions of Android and eight different APIs for developers to juggle, with a significant number of users still on releases from 2010 - such as the 24 percent still on Gingerbread (2.3) and 1.6 percent on Froyo (2.2). Then there are the 18.6 percent on Ice Cream Sandwich," the site reports.
Google has plans to fix the problem of Android operating system fragmentation with KitKat by giving it the ability to run on lower-end Android smartphone devices sometime in the very near future.
For more information on the distribution you can check out a chart HERE via ZDNet.
