Blog / iOS 7 adoption

December 11, 2013
in
Apple

Apple’s App Store Usage Numbers Suggest iOS 7 Adoption at 74 Percent
Remember those people who thought iOS 7 adoption would be slower than iOS 6’s last year because people would reject the new UI design? Didn’t happen.
Source: Daring Fireball

Tons of people are upgrading to iOS 7, that’s undeniable. It has a lot of great new features like Control Center and background app updating. It also features a hideous design that’s somewhere between Microsoft’s Windows 8 and Android’s Holo but without the polish of either. Not hard to go on Dribbble and find better iOS 7 designs.

What if people did reject the new design? How would we know?

Once iOS 7 released on September 20, 2013, all iOS devices in Apple Stores were immediately upgraded to version 7. If you walked in on the 19th and wanted a device running iOS 6, you’re good. Walk in a day later and you’re out of luck. Devices at other retail stores will remain on the old operating system, but not for long. I don’t begrudge Apple for keeping their devices up to date, but it doesn’t help the argument that people aren’t rejecting the new OS if they can’t choose.
Let’s say you have an iOS 6 device you don’t want upgraded to iOS 7. Apple automatically downloads the new OS for you and will take up a gigabyte of space on your device. On a 16 gigabyte iPhone this is almost 10% of your free space held hostage. You can’t stop this or delete the file once it’s downloaded. It also shows a (1) notification on the Settings app, annoying clean freaks like me.
If you upgrade your device to iOS 7 and reject it, you’re out of luck. You can’t go back to ios 6. Apple doesn’t allow downgrades. If they did it would solve the entire debate.
Still reject it? Your only recourse is to throw away your expensive hardware. All those Lightning cables are unusable if you switch to an Android or Windows Phone. Kiss those precious apps goodbye.

It’s not so simple. I hate iOS 7. It looks childish and slapdash. I sincerely hope Apple is working on standardizing the icons and thinking about things like UI affordances when tapping on glass. But I needed that gigabyte of space back on my iPhone, so I upgraded. I’d go back to iOS 6 in a heartbeat, but Apple holds the defibrillator.