Apple Is Slow-Rolling iOS 27 Adoption, So Far

David Smith, last week: Been really interesting to watch the iOS 27 adoption curve over the first two weeks. Clearly on a different path than previous years. Still steadily growing, at a similar rate to the ‘steady growth’ phase of most years, but without the big surge at the start. Given that this rate is largely controlled by Apple’s automatic update logic, I suspect it’s a deliberate choice. Likely because it lets them manage the Siri AI waiting list and avoid a big queue on day one. Smith’s numbers are from analytics from users of Widgetsmith and Pedometer++. If you look at his chart for Widgetsmith , there’s really no explanation other than that Apple pushing automatic updates to users more slowly than in any previous year, and I think it makes sense that this is to gate admissions to Siri AI. You can also see from his chart that has been slowing down initial .0 updates in recent years — the adoption rates were much faster for iOS 15 and 16 back in 2021 and 2022. Note too that every year Apple makes it more and more likely that users will opt into automatic software updates. The overwhelming majority of iOS users get OS updates when their devices update themselves. (It’s purely personal anecdata, but I feel like Siri AI has gotten worse since iOS 27.0 was officially released. It feels a bit slower and I seem to get worse answers, sometimes. I asked it for a word today, using it as an interactive thesaurus, and it simply told me it couldn’t. It never did that over the summer.