There is always a lot of excitement around the WWDC keynote, as Apple unveils its latest operating systems, features, and sometimes new hardware. One part that is usually overlooked by most people is in the first few minutes of the presentation. This is when Apple shows a bunch of numbers; numbers that show the strength of the platform. Let’s look at those numbers and what they mean for Apple.
77
This is the number of countries where WWDC attendees are from. Make no mistake, the Apple’s platform has a global presence. No matter where you do business, you can be sure that some of your employees and customers are using Apple products.
20 Million
Number of developer accounts registered with Apple, more than ever before. The developer community continues to grow, and as long as there are developers making apps, the platform will continue to be well adopted.
6000
That’s how many people were at WWDC. This number seems higher than the years when the event was in San Francisco. WWDC continues to sell out, even with a $5k price tag. The developer community (and their employers) continue to see the event as a worthwhile investment. Access to Apple engineers to get through the gritty details of all of the new features is well worth the cost, if their apps can leverage it from day 1.
10; 500,000,000
This is a bit of scary number to me, as I have been working with the iOS platform since the app store launched, but it has now been live for 10 years. It is the largest app marketplace, and has 500 million weekly visitors! If you have an app for the consumer marketplace, it should be in Apple’s App Store.
$100 billion
Yes, 100 BILLION has been paid out to app developers from their apps in the store. There is an opportunity to make serious money with the right app in the store!
350,000
Swift is starting to pick up steam, as 350k apps in the store are Swift apps. When Swift first launched, they were upfront about there being breaking changes coming, and they weren’t kidding. Every time a new version came out, my Swift projects wouldn’t compile anymore. The language has stabilized and it is probably worth a second look. Enterprise applications can be less gun shy now about embracing the new language. Once we get more into the iOS 12 beta, we’ll see how much of the underlying frameworks are on Swift.
7; 50%
iOS users are always quick to update to the latest version, and it was no different with iOS 11. After only 7 weeks, 50% of the devices had upgraded. We’ll go into more detail about upgrade rates in the next stat.
81% vs 6%
Percentage of iOS devices on the latest version of iOS vs the number of Android devices on the latest. I’ve always seen this as a big differentiator between the two platforms. Android ceded control over their platform when they made it open, allowing service providers and hardware manufacturers to dictate which devices get updates. Supporting iOS means you don’t have to test old versions of the OS, limit what new features you can use, or conditionally enable features of your application.
100%
This is the percentage of devices that were able to get iOS 11 that will get iOS 12. This includes devices going back to 2013. This is a big change from prior years. It used to be that a certain set of devices would become obsolete every year, but this is the first time since the early days that I remember all the current devices being eligible for the new version. If your company owns devices, you just got an extra year before you have to upgrade.
In Summary:
It’s clear to me that the Apple ecosystem is still thriving. Whether you are building an enterprise app or a consumer app, iOS should be a platform you support. The keynote is the most visible part of WWDC, but it only kicks off the week. As more details come out, we will evaluate them, what they mean for enterprise applications, and write about the important ones.
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