On Wednesday, the 19th of September, Apple released iOS 6. According to research done by Chitika, an online advertising company, they say that 15% of iOS devices in the United States and Canada updated to the new version within the first 24 hours. That’s frankly astonishing when you think about it. To put that number into some perspective, Chitika says that Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, despite being a couple of months old now, is only responsible for 1.5% of web traffic in the same two countries. Say what you will about Apple and how expensive the iPhone is, but the company sure seems to know how to make sure that their customers are using the most up to date software.
Speaking about iOS 6, we should bring up some of the problems that people are facing. One, Apple pulled out the YouTube application. Why? Because Apple hates Google. Now this doesn’t matter all that much because Google already has a YouTube application in Apple’s App Store. It’s the number one free application at the moment. Two, Apple pulled out Google Maps. The maps they replaced them with, Apple Maps, are not only uglier, but they’re far less accurate. This is a huge problem because navigation is central to most people’s smartphone usage. Rumor has it that Google is working on porting Google Maps to iOS, but we have absolutely no idea when it’s going to go live. Three, Apple pissed off Switzerland, but that’s another problem all together.
Back to the main story, the key takeaway here is that being in control of your platform lets you make sure that people get to use the latest and greatest version of said platform. We really hope Google changes their attitude towards Android in 2013 and forces companies like Samsung and HTC to make devices that do a better job at respecting Google’s vision of what mobile computing should look like.