Last week, news about the adoption rates for Apple’s iOS 26 update started making the rounds. The new update, these reports claim, was being installed at dramatically lower rates than past iOS updates. And while we can’t infer anything about why people might choose not to install iOS 26, the conclusion being jumped to is that iPhone users are simply desperate to avoid the redesigned Liquid Glass user interface.
The numbers do in fact look bad: Statcounter data for January suggests that the various versions of iOS 26 are running on just 16.6 percent of all devices, compared to around 70 percent for the various versions of iOS 18. The iOS 18.7 update alone—released at the same time as iOS 26.0 in September for people who wanted the security patches but weren’t ready to step up to a brand-new OS—appears to be running on nearly one-third of all iOS devices.
Those original reports were picked up and repeated because they tell a potentially interesting story of the “huge if true” variety: that users’ aversion to the Liquid Glass design is so intense and widely held that it’s actively keeping users away from the operating system. But after examining our own traffic numbers, as well as some technical changes made in iOS 26, it appears as though Statcounter’s data is dramatically undercounting the number of iOS 26 devices out in the wild.
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