{"id":235117,"date":"2026-01-15T19:37:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-15T19:37:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/235117\/"},"modified":"2026-01-15T19:37:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-15T19:37:07","slug":"are-people-avoiding-ios-26-because-of-liquid-glass-its-complicated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/235117\/","title":{"rendered":"Are people avoiding iOS 26 because of Liquid Glass? It\u2019s complicated."},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, news about the adoption rates for Apple\u2019s iOS 26 update started making the rounds. The new update, these reports claim<\/a>, was being installed at dramatically lower rates than past iOS updates. And while we can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

The numbers do, in fact, look bad: Statcounter data for January suggests<\/a> 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\u2014released at the same time as iOS 26.0 in September for people who wanted the security patches but weren\u2019t ready to step up to a brand-new OS\u2014appears to be running on nearly one-third of all iOS devices.<\/p>\n

Those original reports were picked up and repeated because they tell a potentially interesting story of the \u201chuge if true\u201d variety: that users\u2019 aversion to the Liquid Glass design is so intense and widespread that it\u2019s 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 Statcounter\u2019s data is dramatically undercounting the number of iOS 26 devices in the wild.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve taken a high-level look at all iPhone traffic across all Cond\u00e9 Nast websites for October, November, and December of 2025 and compared it to traffic from October, November, and December of 2024. This data suggests that iOS 26 is being adopted more slowly than iOS 18 was the year before\u2014roughly 76 percent of all iPhone pageviews came from devices running iOS 18 in December of 2024, compared to about 45 percent for iOS 26 in December of 2025.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not as cataclysmic a dropoff as Statcounter\u2019s data suggests, even before considering other mitigating factors\u2014iOS 26 dropped support<\/a> for 2018\u2019s iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR, for example, while iOS 18 ran on every iPhone that could run iOS 17.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last week, news about the adoption rates for Apple\u2019s iOS 26 update started making the rounds. The new…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":235118,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[342,111,139,69,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-235117","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mobile","8":"tag-mobile","9":"tag-new-zealand","10":"tag-newzealand","11":"tag-nz","12":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235117\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/235118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}