This past August saw BlackBerry 10 users continue to quickly upgrade their OS systems to the newest version. Use of 10.1 (or higher) is up across both Pixelated and Stuff I Need from the previous month.

The Stuff I Need app showed 91.0% of users on the newest OS version, while for Pixelated the number was 81.9%. Given the aggressive rate of growth, and the large number of users that have upgraded, I think it is safe for developers to begin writing apps that require 10.1 as a minimum OS version. BlackBerry 10 is seeing an adoption rate of the new versions that the older BBOS never came close to.

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 August 2013.

BlackBerry 10 users are continuing to quickly adopt newer OS versions as the percentage of users running OS 10.1 is up significantly from last month. Below are the July stats for the Pixelated and Stuff I Need apps.

The numbers differ a bit between the two apps, but both show encouraging results. The Stuff I Need app had 88.5% of users on the newest OS version, while for Pixelated the number was 75.7%. With this rapid adoption of newer OS versions developers may want to consider dropping support for older OS versions as soon as next month. Even with little cooperation from Verizon, BlackBerry is doing a good job getting its users to upgrade fairly quickly.

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 July 2013.

Last month I sparked some disagreement over on BerryReview when I suggested that the age of the keyboard was over. One month later, and the statistics from July show no reason for me to think any differently as once again the vast majority of BlackBerry 10 users have been keyboard free on the BlackBerry Z10.

While usage of the Q10 is up slightly from last month, there are still almost four times as many users on BlackBerry’s touchscreen only phone. The Q5 while far more popular than last month is still largely irrelevant to this discussion with less than 1% of the marketshare.

I highly doubt that we are ever again going to see a situation where the majority of BlackBerry phones sold have a physical keyboard. The keys are not going away, but they are no where near as important to BlackBerry’s future as most analysts would lead you to believe.

The data used in this chart was collected by BlackBerry World for downloads of the free checklist app Stuff I Need during the month of July.

The numbers for May were a little disappointing, but June found the majority of BlackBerry 10 users running the newest OS version. The two charts below show the percentage of BlackBerry 10 users running each OS version for the game Pixelated and the Stuff I Need check-list app.

For the month of June, both of these apps showed over two thirds of users running OS 10.1 on their phones. While adoption of the newest OS versions is lagging behind what we saw for the PlayBook, it is still far better then what we have seen on the old BlackBerry OS.

This data was collected by BlackBerry World for downloads of the free BlackBerry 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 June 2013.

Last month I set out to predict what sales of BlackBerry 10 devices would be based on statistics from the game Pixelated. My numbers turned out to be very wrong.

With sales of BlackBerry 10 phones closer to 2.7M in the quarter, my estimate had a margin of error of 87%. I would have considered anything less then 10% to be a success. Clearly I was no where close and some of my assumptions were wrong.

I don’t plan on giving up. I now have more data in order to help me make a better prediction for next quarter. Lets hope that the next estimate is closer to the mark.

(Also with only 6.8M phones shipped in the quarter BlackBerry has finally been passed by Windows phone).

Given the popularity of the free game Pixelated I have a healthy data set in order to publish statistics on the BlackBerry ecosystem which I have been lead to believe are fairly accurate. As such I have decided to use this data in order to predict BlackBerry’s sales for Q1 2014 (which ended June 1st and will be reported in the morning on June 28th).

Working on the assumption that there is a correlation between downloads of Pixelated and sales of BlackBerry 10, my model predicts that BlackBerry sold 5.09M BB10 phones in Q1.

As a disclaimer I should point out that there is a possibility that I am spectacularly wrong. Just because I have a mathematical formula doesn’t mean that my assumption are correct. Really the only way to test and verify my model is to publicly post the result and see how it does.

Earlier this week I posted carrier distribution breakdowns for the UK, and for Canada over at BerryReview, and Gadget Masters. Both of these charts are based on data collected by BlackBerry World, as the time of download for downloads of Pixelated during April. Next month I will look at the situation in the United States as well.