Clearly September 16, 2015 was a big day for Apple with the release of iOS 9, their latest operating system for Apple’s handheld devices like iPhone and iPad. This version release was already a center of attention since the day Apple announced it in WWDC 2015, continuing with their tradition of announcing new iOS versions at WWDC.
This operating system release is majorly focused on intelligence and proactiveness, meaning making it possible for devices to learn user habits and act on that information to provide users with valid and accurate suggestions, opening up apps beforehand, recommendations related to daily life, all making life easier for the user. Split-Screen Multitasking is one of the limelight features of this release with others including but not limited to great upgrades to Siri (the personal assistant), deeper search capabilities, added checklist and sketching features, and new San Francisco font to add an eye candy to the user interface.
Apart from its new News application, optional iCloud Drive application, and trackpad for iPad devices, Apple claims to have made some significant under the hood performance improvements along with battery optimizations and a new Low power Mode to extend battery life. Finally, you might not need to carry your charger along with you everywhere now.
The outcome of this is that iOS 9 has received more than 36.7% downloads within 72 hours of its release as per Mixpanel. The statistics for iOS 9 are clearly optimistic for Apple since within 24 hours of its release iOS 9 reached 12.3% downloads on all iOS devices. And within 48 hours, by Friday it crossed 20.1% mark surpassing its predecessor iOS 8 at 19.4%. Apart from many magic features, the fact that iOS 9 takes only around 2GB space for update compared to 5GB for iOS 8 has clearly made a difference.
Comparing with the biggest competitor Android whose latest release Andorid 5.0, Lollipop is installed on around 21% devices of active users, which took it almost a year to reach that mark. Even though a major reason behind this is that Android is far more distributed, with various manufacturers using their own tweaked versions of Android makes it difficult for Google to release an update. On the other hand Apple can boast to be ‘Up to Date’, providing bug fixes and new features to be made available to users as quickly as possible.
And since one in a three devices has iOS 9 installed, Apple has already made a mandate for new applications uploaded for review to support iOS 9. It also undoubtedly indicates that for developers with their applications available on App Store, it is time to upgrade these applications to support iOS 9 to stay with the market before being thrown out of the competition.