Third-Party Browsers Report Different iOS Version Numbers Than Safari ⇥ macrumors.com

Hartley Charlton, MacRumors:

In the first week of January last year, 89.3% of MacRumors visitors used a version of iOS 18. This year, during the same time period, only 25.7% of MacRumors readers are running a version of iOS 26. In the absence of official numbers from Apple, the true adoption rate remains unknown, but the data suggests a level of hesitation toward iOS 26 that has not been seen in recent years.

The numbers being reported — 15% from StatCounter, 26% from MacRumors, and 55% from TelemetryDeck — are all over the place, but there is a clear-ish direction: people are not updating to iOS 26 like they have previous versions of iOS. There are lots of possible reasons why. Liquid Glass is the most visible explanation, but it is also possible the growing size of iOS plays a role. Apple Intelligence alone consumes nearly 7 GB of disk space on my iPhone.

Even so, the differences in these numbers are wild, especially compared to previous years where there was tighter agreement between different reports. For example, in January last year, TelemetryDeck reported about 78% were running iOS 18, StatCounter said it was 63%, and Apple itself said it was 68% of all iPhone users, rising to 76% adoption among users of devices four years old or newer. That is a fifteen point spread between. This year, with only third-party data so far available, it is a forty point spread between StatCounter’s 15% and TelemetryDeck’s 55%. Something is not adding up.

Update: My iPhone running iOS 26.3 is detected by StatCounter’s user agent detection tool as an iOS 18.7 device. This reflects how StatCounter says is how it collects its figures. Two other devices running iOS 26 were also detected by StatCounter as iOS 18.7 devices; however, on one of them in the Chrome browser, StatCounter correctly detected it as iOS 26.1. I also see this effect in my own limited analytics, where the only reports of iOS 26 versions are non-Safari browsers. If an analytics package relies on the OS version string in the user agent, it will also misreport iOS 26 Safari users.