BlackBerry OS usage over the past year

The number of BlackBerry phones running OS 6.0 has increased to 25.2% of the market last month. While 84.0% of BlackBerrys now run OS 5.0 or higher.

Eight months after the release of OS 5.0 it had already captured over twice the market, while OS 6.0 is only doing half as well at the eight month mark. Overall adoption of the newer OS is mostly being held back by the limited number of upgrades from devices that originally were released with 5.0 operating systems. Given the lack of an upgrade path, it would be expected to see a similarly slow uptake of OS 7.0 when it is released this summer. (Although 7.0 will be helped some by being available on all the major US carriers at launch).

As usual this data is taken from downloads of the popular BlackBerry strategy game Pixelated. Data starts from the release of version 2.0 in April of 2010, and goes through the end of last month.