Latest iOS 26 market share comes as a big surprise for Apple four months after release

It's been four months since Apple released its iOS 26 update for supported iPhone models. Thanks to its tight control over hardware and software development, Apple has a high adoption rate for its software updates.

However, it doesn't seem to be the case with iOS 26, at least according to third-party data from StatCounter. The analytics firm published its worldwide market share numbers for different iOS versions in January 2026, revealing that iOS 26 has a combined market share of about 15%, including iOS 26.1 (10.59%) and iOS 26.2 (4.48%).

It's a sharp decline from last year, when the combined market share for the iOS 18 update was around 63% in January 2025. This was corroborated by Apple's own device usage data for iOS 18, which revealed that the update was running on 67% of all supported devices in the same month.

It has been a typical trend for iOS updates to reach at least three out of four supported iPhones after a few months of release. Moreover, Apple achieves an adoption rate of about 90% around June each year.

But iOS 26 differs from recent updates because of the Liquid Glass design language. It's Apple's biggest design overhaul in years, which has been rolled out across all its operating systems.

Liquid Glass brings a fresh coat of paint with glass-like, translucent UI elements that mimic how glass would behave in real life when placed on top of different materials. Liquid Gass didn't become a fan favorite and received mixed feedback from users, which could be one reason for the reduced adoption. Apple has made improvements to Liquid Glass over incremental updates.

On the other hand, the security-focused iOS 18.7 currently has the highest market share of 33.83%, followed by iOS 18.6 with 24.23%, according to StatCounter. Apple has yet to publish its official data for the iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 updates. So, it remains to be seen how much difference will be visible between the third-party and official numbers.

In your free time, you can read about our guide covering 33 small and useful iOS 26 features and our comprehensive roundup of everything Apple released in 2025.

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Posted Saturday 10 January 2026 at 6:07 am AEST (my time).

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