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South Korea leads the iOS 9 charge, as nearly one in five Apple users upgrade

iOS 9 adoption has reached 19 percent since Apple released the update on Wednesday.
Written by Liam Tung, Contributing Writer
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iOS adoption reaches 19 percent.
Image: Mixpanel

In under 48 hours, Apple's new iOS 9 has been installed on 19 percent of all iOS devices, according to figures from a mobile analytics firm.

Despite some early objections to Apple's new 'San Francisco compact' font for iOS 9 and a technical glitch that stalled the update, iOS users appear not to be resisting the upgrade.

Analytics firm Mixpanel on Thursday reported iOS 9 adoption had reached 12 percent within 24 hours of Apple's release on Wednesday. That figure has now climbed to 19 percent, which, for comparison, is the same level that Android's Lollipop reached after just under one year.

Adoption of iOS 9 isn't expected to be as slow as iOS 8, in part due to the smaller footprint of the update, which requires only 1.3GB of space compared to 5GB for the upgrade from iOS 7.

Still, as mobile advertising firm Tapjoy pointed out yesterday, after 18 hours iOS 9 adoption was only a tad faster than iOS 8 and still lagged iOS 7, which reached 15 percent adoption in the same timeframe. Its analysis is based on 200 million iOS devices.

Tapjoy also noted that seven percent of iPhone owners had upgraded, while four percent of iPads, and six percent of iPods had iOS 9 installed.

iOS users in South Korea were moving to iOS 9 faster than any other nation with 9.29 percent having made the move, followed by Japan at 9.52 percent. More than seven percent of devices in China, the UK, and Italy had been updated, followed by the US, Canada, and Germany at around six percent.

Differences between the speed of iOS adoption in different versions are likely to shrink in coming days. Last year, Apple's first update to its iOS distribution figures following the release of iOS 8 revealed a 46 percent takeup rate within four days of its release. iOS 7 was installed by 52 percent of US users after seven days.

Apple's most recent iOS distribution figures based on App Store measurements was on September 14 and shows that 87 percent of iOS devices are running iOS 8 while 11 percent a running iOS 7.

Read more on iOS 9

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