Summary

Gruber debunks widely circulated claims that iOS 26 adoption is bizarrely low at just 15%, tracing the false narrative to Statcounter's failure to account for Safari 26 freezing the OS version in its user agent string. Safari now reports iOS 18.6 regardless of whether the device runs iOS 18.6 or iOS 26, causing Statcounter to massively undercount iOS 26 users. Wikimedia's more reliable data shows iOS 26 at 50% adoption in January 2026 — lower than iOS 18's 72% and iOS 17's 65% at the same point, but nowhere near the absurd 15% figure. Gruber argues the genuinely lower adoption is explained by Apple deliberately slow-rolling automatic updates because iOS 26 is a more significant and buggier release. He emphasizes that most iPhone users simply let updates happen automatically, and Apple controls the timing of those rollouts.

Key Insight

The viral narrative of catastrophically low iOS 26 adoption was built on broken web analytics that couldn't detect Safari's frozen user agent string, while the genuinely slower rollout is simply Apple controlling its own automatic update schedule for a buggier release.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 6

  The methodology behind these numbers is broken and the numbers are totally wrong.

• 6

  Those false numbers are so low, so jarringly different from previous years, that it boggles my mind that they didn't raise a red flag for anyone who took a moment to consider them.

• 7

  So, no, iOS 26 adoption isn't at just 15 percent, which only a dope would believe, but it's not as high as previous iOS versions in previous years at this point on the calendar.

• 5

  What's going on, quite obviously, is that Apple itself is slow-rolling the automatic updates to iOS 26.

• 5

  Apple has been slower to push those updates to iOS 26 than they have been for previous iOS updates in recent years. With good reason! iOS 26 is a more significant — and buggier — update than iOS 18 and 17 were.

• 3

  But the overwhelming majority of Apple users — especially iPhone users — just let their devices update automatically.

• 2

  They might like iOS 26's changes, they might dislike them, or they might not care or even notice. But they just let their software updates happen automatically.

Tone

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