iPhone OS 3.0 Adoption Rate Estimates All Over The Place

On Monday, June 22 Apple announced that six million customers downloaded the new iPhone OS 3.0 during its first five days of availability, which sounds like a lot but there are so many variables to take into account.  So what exactly is the adoption rate at this point, and should anyone be concerned? iPhone OS 3.0 has now been officially available for one week.  During the WWDC keynote, Apple announced that there were 4o+ million iPhone OS capable devices in the wild, which obviously includes the iPhone and iPod touch.  Of those 40+ million devices, six million have the new OS installed, which is about a 15 percent adoption rate.  It has already been a couple of days since the figures were announced, and you must also take into account that some of those 40+ million devices may not be in use anymore, so there are a lot of variables missing yet, but we can only base our opinions on the data that is available. AdMob, the mobile ad analysis firm, released some their own adoption rate figures from Saturday, June 20.  The results indicated that 44 percent of iPhone ad requests were from devices running iPhone OS 3.0.  That's actually quite a lot considering the OS was launched only three days prior to those statistics.  The alarming number is that only 1 percent of iPod touch ad requests were from devices running 3.0.  A single percent. Tapbots, the developer of the popular iPhone app Convertbot, has just released their own iPhone OS 3.0 adoption rate statistics strictly based on their users, so these must be taken with a grain of salt, but they still show the vast difference between iPhone and iPod touch iPhone OS 3.0 adoption.  According to their statistics, nearly 80 percent of their iPhone users are already running iPhone OS 3.0.  In comparison, about 50 percent of their iPod touch users are running the new OS.  Tapbots didn't release the number of units that the statistics were based on, however. Just from these two sources, we can already come to two conclusions: The first and most obvious is that $9.95 is a very large upgrade deterrent for iPod touch users and the second is that those who frequently visit the App Store to download apps, like Convertbots, are more likely to download the new OS, or at least right now. These statics are very, very premature, and it is likely that over the next few days, weeks, and months the new iPhone OS 3.0 will see much greater adoption.  It will be interesting to see, however, how iPod touch users react over time.  Many apps in the App Store already require 3.0, and as time passes this will only become even more common.  In the end, it may force many iPod touch users to have to upgrade. We would like to hear from all of you out there, especially iPod touch users.  Are you starting to feel the need to upgrade to 3.0?

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