Last week I wrote a blog post criticizing news media coverage of a recent issue with Logitech mouse driver software, because the stories included misinformation about how macOS Developer ID code signing works, a subject on which I have significant expertise. The news media outlets failed to check the facts before publication. Unfortunately, it turns out that that just a day later, the news media blew it again on a different story: the adoption rate of iOS 26. It started with Cult of Mac, which linked to January data from StatCounter appearing to show that only 15% of iOS users had updated to version 26, extremely low compared to previous years, which showed over 50% adoption rates for the latest iOS version in January. The story was picked up by 9to5Mac, iPhone in Canada, Macworld, The Mac Observer, and ZDNET, among others. According to 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 MacRumors stats appeared to provide some independent support for the StatCounter data. I made the mistake of starting to believe the story based on this, without checking the facts myself. In my defense, I’m not a news media outlet, so that’s not my job, and moreover I didn’t publish an article about iOS 26 adoption, until now.
The only site that got it right, eventually, is Pixel Envy by Nick Heer, who pointed out that the Safari browser User-Agent was partially frozen on iOS 26, as discussed in a September WebKit blog post:
Also, now in Safari on iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS 26 the user agent string no longer lists the current version of the operating system. Safari 18.6 on iOS has a UA string of:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 18_6 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/18.6 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1And Safari 26.0 on iOS has a UA string of:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 18_6 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/26.0 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1This matches the long-standing behavior on macOS, where the user agent string for Safari 26.0 is:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/26.0 Safari/605.1.15It was back in 2017 when Safari on Mac first started freezing the Mac OS string. Now the behavior on iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS does the same in order to minimize compatibility issues. The WebKit and Safari version number portions of the string will continue to change with each release.
The question is, if the OS version is always reported as 18, then where did StatCounter get 15% web visits from iOS 26 rather than 0%? Nick Heer’s initial theory was strange:
In both, you will notice
iPhone OSis set to “18_6” despite only one of them actually running iOS 18.6. If StatCounter was relying on this part of the user agent string for calculating operating system version number, it could be inaccurate. There is still a Safari version number that could be a proxy for the operating system version in the latter part of the user agent string, however. On my iPhone, running iOS 26.3, the relevant section readsVersion/26.3 Mobile/15E148 Safari. TheiPhone OSstring also reads “18_7”, which is also true for users running iOS 26.2.It is not like StatCounter has no data for iOS 26. It shows traffic from iOS 26.1 and 26.2, indicating it likely updated its tracking metrics. It is possible some of the 18.6 and 18.7 traffic is also iOS 26 — we just do not know how much.
I pushed back on this theory, because iOS 26 was released in September, but the StatCounter data was exclusively from January, and the Cult of Mac story was published on January 8, so it makes little sense that StatCounter updated its tracking metrics sometime during the first week of January, not to mention that MacRumors reported a non-zero percentage of iOS 26 web visits too. Thus, it seemed possible that StatCounter and MacRumors were looking at the Safari version in the User-Agent in order to detect iOS 26.
I now believe that Heer’s follow-up theory is correct: both StatCounter and MacRumors were measuring only third-party web browsers on iOS 26, which explains the extremely low adoption rates, since Safari is the overwhelming market share leader on iOS. Heer noticed that StatCounter’s User-Agent detection tool continues to get the iOS version wrong with Safari but gets it right with Google Chrome. Thus, Heer’s initial theory got it backwards: StatCounter never updated its tracking metrics for the new Safari User-Agent.
Looking at the logs for this very website, lapcatsoftware.com, most of the User-Agent headers that begin with “Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 26” or “Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 26” include “CriOS/” or “FxiOS/”, which are the iOS versions of Chrome and Firefox. Although Apple forces all web browsers on iOS to use WebKit, the User-Agent OS version is frozen only with Safari, not with other browsers, so third-party browsers still accurately report the iOS version.
I’m certain that every news media site reporting the iOS 26 adoption rate story has its own web statistics, counting visitors to the site. Did nobody bother to look? MacRumors, for one, did bother to look…at something, but I suspect that MacRumors is still using the outdated methodology that no longer works with Safari 26 and thus made the same mistake that StatCounter is making. For a story as surprising and important as this one, I would expect the media fact checkers to look at the raw data, which would likely show that their iOS 26 web visitors were all using third-party browsers such as Chrome and Firefox.
Despite the errors in counting web visitors, iOS 26 adoption may still be slower than previous years, though not nearly as slow as reported by StatCounter and the news media. As noted by Nick Heer, TelemetryDeck shows a significant difference:
Data from TelemetryDeck seems more robust, and suggests about 55% of iOS users have updated to iOS 26, compared to about 78% of users one year ago running iOS 18. Not as bad as StatCounter’s figures, but still a twenty-point gap between latest version uptake last year and this year.
And TelemetryDeck’s numbers from January 2025 were higher than Apple’s own reported numbers from January 2025, so if TelemetryDeck overreports upgraders, then it’s possible that only half or fewer than half of iOS users have updated to version 26 at this point. For what it’s worth, on this website (which is relatively low traffic and I would guess disproportionately attracts software developers and other technical users), 87% of iPhone visitors in January 2025 were reporting iPhone OS 18, whereas only 60% of iPhone visitors in January 2026 are reporting either non-Safari iPhone OS 26 or Safari Version/26 (mostly the latter), so my site may also be seeing a drop in adoption this year. (I updated my own iPhone to iOS 26 in December.)
By the way, I’m a bit puzzled by Apple’s partial freezing of the Safari User-Agent on iOS, because Safari is always inseparable from the OS, so it’s possible to derive the iOS version from the Safari version, which continues to be incremented in the User-Agent. On macOS, in contrast, the latest version of Safari typically supports the three latest major OS versions, so Safari 26 can be installed on macOS 15 Sequoia and macOS 14 Sonoma in addition to macOS 26 Tahoe, and therefore the User-Agent—which actually says “OS X 10_15_7”!—is a little more effective at obscuring the OS version.