Apple's latest iOS 7.1 operating system has already hit 5.9 percent adoption in its first 24 hours of availability, according to new analytics data.
The new version of Apple's OS only rolled out on Monday, March 10, but it has already graced 5.9 percent of iOS devices in North America in its first 24 hours since release.
The data comes from analytics firm Chitika, which reported its findings on Tuesday, March 11. The company analyzed tens of millions of U.S. and Canadian iOS-based ad impressions from March 9 through March 11 to get its estimates.
"As with most minor version updates, iOS 7.1 adoption rates have been less dramatic than those of its major-version counterparts," notes Chitika. "In the first 24 hours following the operating system's public release, iOS 7.1 users generated 5.9% of total North American iOS Web traffic."
As Chitika points out, the adoption rates for iOS 7.1 are similar to those of iOS 7.0.6, which saw a 13.3 percent adoption in its first 48 hours of availability, and a 25 percent adoption after four days. At the time, that update brought along a critical security fix.
The new iOS 7.1, meanwhile, comes with some improvements to the company's Touch ID fingerprint scanner (found on the iPhone 5S), the usual bug fixes, CarPlay support, and a number of visual tweaks. The latter enhancements include revamped Shift and Caps Lock keys for the keyboard, as well as refined icons for the FaceTime, Phone, and Messages apps. Apple has also redesigned some aspects of the Phone dialer and shutdown screen with its latest update.
"Looking more broadly, iOS 7 users overall generated more than 80% iOS Web traffic on average over the three-day timespan of this study," adds the report. "This likely represents a peak, as it has remained largely unchanged since our previous study (81% on February 25). With this in mind, all eyes will be on iOS 8 and whether it can continue Apple's streak of higher rates of adoption for each successive major release."
The analytics firm's overall iOS 7 usage data for North America seems to fall in line with Apple's own reports from its App Store support page for developers, which suggests that 83 percent of all iOS devices have iOS 7 on board as of March 9, 2014.
