I have a few updates since my blog post yesterday, The news media blew it again: iOS 26 adoption measured only third-party browsers. First, Nick Heer, whose insights my blog post was attempting to disseminate, published a new article with a title less clickbaity than mine, Updating the Record on iOS 26 Usage Share:
I made a mistake on Friday: instead of waiting to polish a more comprehensive article, I effectively live-blogged my shifting understanding of how StatCounter was collecting its iOS version number data by way of updates and edits to existing posts.
This is why I acted as Heer’s unpaid, unsolicited publicist. ;-)
Second, AppleInsider linked to my blog post and provided some corroboration of the theory:
AppleInsider's editorial team did consider writing a similar story about the data when we spotted it. We too looked at our traffic logs, but after seeing all of the iOS 26 user agent logs were on third-party browsers, we saw that there was a problem.
Thanks, AppleInsider!
Third, Macworld also took notice of my blog post and published an update:
The remaining mystery is why there are any iOS 26 users at all in StatCounter’s data. One possibility, discussed by software engineer Jeff Johnson in a sternly worded blog, is that these are all iPhone owners running third-party browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Dolphin, and so on, rather than Safari. Which makes sense, since the version reporting is specifically a Safari issue… although at that point a total of 15 percent (considering that they have to be both using a third-party browser and running iOS 26) sounds remarkably high. Safari has a huge market share on the iPhone.
A sternly worded blog. I love it! Nick Heer suggested that I use it as a tagline, so now I have, on the blog index page and in the RSS (Atom) feed.
In response to the second part of the quote, I don’t think 15% is remarkably high for third-party browsers on iOS 26. Heer pointed me toward the Cloudflare statistics for market share by OS, which put Safari at 78%, leaving 22% for other browsers, led by Chrome. If 68% of those users have updated to iOS 26, that would amount to a 15% market share for third-party browsers on iOS 26.
In any case, I’m glad that Macworld published an update on the story.
I suspect that when Macworld was looking my blog post from yesterday, they also noticed my previous blog post, Myths about Logitech Developer ID certificate expiration, which criticized Macworld along with a number of other news outlets. In the Macworld RSS feed I noticed an update to their earlier article about the Logitech incident. The update actually appeared as a new article in my feed this morning, even though the link URL remained the same as before, I think because the original article, published on January 7, disappeared from the RSS, which contains only a limited number of items, and reappeared in the RSS when the update was published. The article originally made this false claim:
In macOS, some software needs to have a Developer ID certificate to run. The certificates are good for five years, after which they need to be renewed with Apple. If not, then the app will stop working.
The article now has a note at the bottom, “Update January 13: Added clarification about the Developer ID certificate.” The original false claim is still included but immediately contradicted by a correction from the Apple documentation, cited by my blog post:
In macOS, some software needs to have a Developer ID certificate to run. The certificates are good for five years, after which they need to be renewed with Apple. If not, then the app will stop working. However, as Apple’s documentation states, “As long as your Developer ID certificate was valid when you compiled your app, then users can download and run your app, even after the expiration date of the certificate. However, you’ll need a new certificate to sign updates and new applications.” So it seems as though Logitech attempted to push an update to its app after the certificate had expired..
Unfortunately, the correction is immediately followed by new speculation that’s at best confusing and at worst false. While it’s true that Logitech did push an update to its app after the certificate had expired, the update was a fix for the issues that were occurring, not the cause of those issues. I don’t think that Macworld quite understood the technical details of what I was saying or what Logitech itself was saying. However, I’ll give Macworld partial credit for trying to correct the record, in not just one but two stories. That’s certainly more than other news outlets, and after all they did give me a great new tagline!
Sternly yours, Jeff