BlackBerry 10 has seen a continuing slow uptake of newer OS versions in the month of June.
Pixelated saw 86% of users on the newest OS version, while the Stuff I Need app had 92% of their users on the newest OS.
This data was collected by BlackBerry World for downloads of the free strategy game Pixelated and the free checklist app Stuff I Need. Data shown on the chart is from the beginning of June 2013 through the end of June 2014.
The month of May saw rather modest gains in the uptake of newer OS versions on BlackBerry 10.
There was very little change among users of the Stuff I Need app, while there was a small increase in the percentage of Pixelated users on the newest OS version. Meanwhile relativity few users are running OS 10.3, with the newest leak being far less popular then 10.2 was half a year ago.
This data was collected by BlackBerry World for downloads of the free strategy game Pixelated and the free checklist app Stuff I Need. Data shown on the chart is from the beginning of May 2013 through the end of May 2014.
For the first month ever, March showed a majority of classic BBOS users running OS 7 on their phones. While the majority of BlackBerry 10 users have usually updated in the first month after the release of a new operating system, OS 7 has now been out for 34 months…
The most popular BBOS device in the month of May was the Curve 9320.
This data was collected by BlackBerry World for downloads of the free BlackBerry strategy game Pixelated. Data shown on the chart is from the beginning of May 2013 through the end of May 2014, and does not include BlackBerry 10 or PlayBook devices.
The above chart (click to enlarge) shows the distribution of BBOS versions over the past four years.
A few thoughts…
This data was collected by BlackBerry World for downloads of the free BlackBerry strategy game Pixelated. Data shown on the chart is from the beginning of April 2010 through the end of April 2014, and does not include BlackBerry 10 or PlayBook devices.
April once again saw an increase of BlackBerry 10 users running the newest version of the operating system.
As has been the pattern, users of the Stuff I Need app were once again quicker to upgrade than users of Pixelated. For Pixelated 77.0% of users were running OS 10.2.1, while for the Stuff I Need app 91.8% of downloads went to users running the newest OS.
This data was collected by BlackBerry World for downloads of the free strategy game Pixelated and the free checklist app Stuff I Need. Data shown on the chart is from the beginning of April 2013 through the end of April 2014.
A look at the OS distribution on BBOS, showed no change in March, and for the most part almost nothing has changed in the last six months.
While BlackBerry 10 has shown rapid adoption of the newest operating systems, on the classic BBOS only 48.6% of users are running OS 7 (which itself is almost three years old at this point). And despite being launched half a decade ago, OS 5.0 still continues to account for a significant percentage of the market.
This data was collected by BlackBerry World for downloads of the free BlackBerry strategy game Pixelated. Data shown on the chart is from the beginning of March 2013 through the end of March 2014, and does not include BlackBerry 10 or PlayBook devices.
March saw more users continue to adopt OS 10.2.1 which now accounts for 73.7% of Pixelated users and 79.2% of Stuff I Need users. Despite these increases, a disturbing number of users continue to run OS 10.1 which is proving slow to go away. At least part of the blame for this falls on AT&T which has not yet approved any of the 10.2.x updates.
The user base continues to be dominated by the BlackBerry Z10 which accounts for the majority of the market at 59.2% of all devices.
This data was collected by BlackBerry World for downloads of the free strategy game Pixelated and the free checklist app Stuff I Need. Data shown on the chart is from the beginning of March 2013 through the end of March 2014.
The BlackBerry PlayBook has been largely abandoned since the update to OS 2.1 in October 2012, but there still remains a sizable number of users on the platform. Following last week’s release of version 4.9 of Xploding Boxes, I looked at downloads of the app by PlayBook users to get a feel for who is still using this tablet.
There was quite a bit of a shift in the user base from a year ago, when I last looked at the data.
The majority of users (53.2%) are from the United States and Canada, with a plurality of users from the Great White North. The PlayBook has had outsized popularity in Canada since day one, so this is no surprise.
The one demographic that has increased significantly since last year is the number of users from Latin America. The region accounted for 16.5% of all users with Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil all individually exceeding 1% of the user base.
These statistics are generated from PlayBook downloads of the popular strategy game Xploding Boxes, from March 17th, through March 23rd. Data was collected by BlackBerry World at the time of download.
The classic BlackBerry OS distribution has gone largely unchanged over the past month with OS 7 still having less then half of the overall market share.
This data was collected by BlackBerry World for downloads of the free BlackBerry strategy game Pixelated. Data shown on the chart is from the beginning of February 2013 through the end of February 2014, and does not include BlackBerry 10 or PlayBook devices.
The month of February showed the majority of BlackBerry 10 users running the newest release of the operating system. As has historically been the trend, users of the Stuff I Need app have been quicker to upgrade than users of Pixelated.
The Stuff I Need checklist app saw 76.7% its downloads from users on OS 10.2.1 which means that it has already caught up to where 10.2.0 was just two months ago. Pixelated users were a bit less likely to upgrade, with only 57.3% of users on the newest OS. Still the upgrade cycle is encouraging as after just one month BlackBerry 10.2.1 has gotten an adoption rate that is better than what BlackBerry 7 has managed to get in two and a half years.
This data was collected by BlackBerry World for downloads of the free strategy game Pixelated and the free checklist app Stuff I Need. Data shown on the chart is from the beginning of February 2013 through the end of February 2014.
Stats from netmarketshare.com and other web statistics sites are showing very low upgrade rates for Windows 8.1 with roughly two out of three users staying on OS 8.0 instead.
With only 37.3% of users upgrading to the newest version of Windows 8, the question is why? Version 8.1 is a free upgrade, and is not subject to the carrier approvals that typically cause issues with upgrade rates. There is an understanding on why users may want to stick with Windows 7, but for those already on 8 there is no reason to not want to upgrade to 8.1 instead.
The culprit may be the manner in which Microsoft is pushing the update. Instead of making the upgrade available through Windows update (as they have traditionally done with service packs), the upgrade to 8.1 must be downloaded from the Windows app store. This process is actually very smooth, but the suspicion is that users simply are not checking the store often enough to notice the upgrade.
A look at the January downloads for the free Stuff I Need app shows that the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom together make up 53.8% of users.
In total, downloads came from 138 different countries, with Germany making a surprising showing at 5.4% of the market. India also does better than expected with the 7th largest number of users despite not being a traditional BlackBerry market.
Just one year into the launch of BlackBerry 10, and users have shown themselves to be rather quick to upgrade to new versions of the OS. While the wireless carriers have interfered with BlackBerry’s ability to get out the newest versions of the operating system to everyone, even the United States seems to have gotten on-board with OS 10.2.1 so expectations are high for next month.
While the day following the launch of 10.2.1 showed 66.61% of users on the newest OS, this came too late in the month to have much of an impact on the overall numbers for January. Growth of newer OS versions was overall steady, but slow. February is expected to be much better as there are now no carriers pretending that OS 10.1 is the newest release.
This data was collected by BlackBerry World for downloads of the free strategy game Pixelated and the free checklist app Stuff I Need. Data shown on the chart is from the beginning of February 2013 through the end of January 2014.
While BlackBerry 10 users have been quick to upgrade, the demographics of the older BBOS are mostly unchanged over the past month. OS 5.0 was first released in 2009, and still claims a decent percentage of the market share. With the release of OS 7.0 coming in 2011, even this version has been around for awhile, but has yet to even capture 50% of the market.
This data was collected by BlackBerry World for downloads of the free BlackBerry strategy game Pixelated. Data shown on the chart is from the beginning of January 2013 through the end of January 2014, and does not include BlackBerry 10 or PlayBook devices.
BlackBerry officially released OS 10.2.1 this past Tuesday, and despite a few wireless carriers blocking the update for their users, the majority of users who downloaded my apps on Wednesday were already running the newest version of the OS. Taking the average from users of Pixelated and the Stuff I Need apps shows 66.61% of users on the newest OS just a day after it officially launched.
Statistics were collected by BlackBerry World for downloads on January 29th of the free strategy game Pixelated and the free checklist app Stuff I Need. Because this is a snapshot of just a single day, the overall sample size is significantly smaller than for most of the statistics that are posted on this site.