Apple iOS 7 Adoption Rate Reaches 85% At The Expense Of iOS 6

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) announced on Monday that the adoption rate of its iOS 7 mobile-operating system, which was rolled out last September, has climbed to 85 percent while the share of iOS 6-running devices has dropped to 12 percent.

According to Apple, for the week ending March 23, the company registered iOS 7 distribution at 85 percent, representing a small increase of 2 percent over the previous period that ended March 9, AppleInsider reported.

The latest numbers, posted by Apple on its App Store developer-support page, come five months after the iOS 7 was originally released and two weeks after the release of iOS 7.1, the first major firmware update to iOS 7 with new features and improvements.

While the adoption rate of iOS 7 has increased, iOS 6 usage has dropped, with only 12 percent of devices currently running on the older OS. However, 3 percent of devices continue to run on even older versions of iOS.

One week after the release of iOS 7, the OS accounted for 52 percent of iOS web share, a statistic that touched 74 percent in early December and 78 percent later that month. Apple announced in late January that iOS 7 adoption had jumped to 80 percent.

By comparison, Google’s (NASDA:GOOG) KitKat, the latest Android version, only accounted for 2.5 percent of Android devices, according to data collected during a seven-day period ending on March 3. The data also revealed that 62 percent of devices had Jelly Bean installed, while 35.5 percent of Android devices were still running earlier versions of the OS.