iOS6 Adoption Rate in India

Apple previewed iOS 6 in June at WWDC and launched it on September 19th, making updates available over-the-air and through iTunes.

iOS 6 offers over 200 new features; including Facebook integration, expanded Siri capabilities, shared Photo Streams, Passbook and more. While many of these new features have been well received, Apple’s new Maps app has failed to impress even the most zealous fans.

We know just how hard it is to please everyone with a new product release; and, as expected, Apple’s new Maps perform excruciatingly poorly in India. Given this, we were curious to see if the Maps debacle was enough to deter people from upgrading to iOS 6.

So, we poked around our mobile traffic stats and here’s what we found…

Prior to its September 19th launch, iOS 6 constituted a negligible 0.2% of the iOS traffic share to our mobile site. On the first day of its release, iOS 6′s share clocked in at 6%. Another four days later, iOS 6 surged to almost a 25% share.

Considering that none of the devices already in the market had this OS by default, and users had to proactively upgrade to it, we can safely conclude that the market has voted decidedly in favour of the other 199 new features on offer.

At the time of going to press, the two most recent versions of iOS (iOS 5.1.x & iOS 6) have a combined contribution of 75% of iOS traffic to our mobile site.

Having answered that question, we took a quick look to see how adoption rates for Android fare in comparison.

Here’s the standings, toe to toe, for iOS and Android adoption rates.

Android’s latest OS Jelly Bean 4.1.x released over two months ago; has a measly 1.8% share of the Android market so far. Over a year has passed since the launch of Ice Cream Sandwich, but its share still hovers at just 28% — a milestone that iOS6 will surpass in just another couple of days.

Even in a market like India (which barely registers on Apple’s radar and where one of iOS 6′s tentpole features, Maps, pretty much doesn’t work at all), the adoption curves for iOS releases are hugely impressive.

As someone recently quipped, Apple has this OS upgrade thing down.