Final 12 months was a major one for Apple’s working methods. Throughout the board, from the iPhone and iPad to the Mac and Imaginative and prescient Professional, platforms have been standardized in each model quantity and look. However not everybody was impressed with the brand new common Liquid Glass design language, typically referred to by an unkind rhyming epithet.
What might in the summertime and fall have been dismissed as a subjective response, the complaints of a vocal minority, can now be quantified. And the newest adoption knowledge signifies that at the least one of many late-2025 working methods has been vastly much less well-liked with clients than its equal the 12 months earlier than. Briefly, hardly anybody is operating iOS 26.
In keeping with StatCounter’s knowledge for January 2026, simply 18.1 p.c of recognized iPhone customers are operating some model of iOS 26. Greater than 4 instances as many are nonetheless utilizing the assorted variations of iOS 18. Right here’s how the numbers stack up by model:
- iOS 18.7: 33.81%
- iOS 18.6: 25.2%
- iOS 26.1: 10.57%
- iOS 18.5: 5.56%
- iOS 26.2: 4.62%
- iOS 16.7: 2.23%
- iOS 15.8: 1.76%
- Different: 16.24%
January 2026. Supply: StatCounter
(Be aware that the “Different” phase might embody 26.0 and different level updates of iOS 26, though none will individually rating greater than iOS 15.8’s 1.76 p.c. For simplicity and within the absence of extra element, I’ve calculated the entire for iOS 26 and 18 as a proportion of customers for whom a model is recognized, and excluding the Different phase.)
For comparability with the identical second in iOS 18’s launch schedule, I dug up StatCounter’s knowledge for January 1-9, 2025. And the distinction is stark:
- iOS 18.1: 46.82%
- iOS 18.2: 12.88%
- iOS 17.6: 9.18%
- iOS 16.7: 3.47%
- iOS 18.0: 3.46%
- iOS 17.5: 3.26%
- iOS 15.8: 2.83%
- Different: 18.11%
January 1-9, 2025. Supply: StatCounter
Based mostly on these figures, at precisely the identical time of 12 months, the newest model of iOS had achieved a 77.1 p.c adoption price. (I’ve iOS 18 at 77.1 p.c of recognized customers, and iOS 17 at 15.2 p.c.) This clearly exhibits how disappointing it’s for iOS 26 to be caught at lower than 20 p.c adoption.
So the adoption numbers are closely down on earlier years. However this may not look like a lot of a difficulty for Apple. In any case, iOS updates are free. Even when iOS 26 is a flop, that received’t scale back the corporate’s income by one cent. (Although it might, conceivably, forestall somebody from upgrading or shopping for a brand new iPhone, however that’s more durable to quantify.)
However whatever the monetary issue, Apple actually cares about OS adoption. One side is safety: if a consumer has the newest model of iOS, additionally they have all the newest patches. One other, which is especially related on this case, is gaining the advertising advantages of iPhones within the wild, being seen with the newest look and the newest options. This is the reason Apple was so proof against consumer customization: it prefers to select what it considers to be the optimum interface, and for that to be the general public face of the iPhone.
Sadly, the newest look appears more likely to be at the least a part of the rationale why iPhone customers aren’t speeding to replace. Simply keep in mind that iOS 26 is about greater than Liquid Glass, and that the worst aesthetic excesses may be toned down by opening the Settings app and going to Show & Brightness > Liquid Glass.
