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iOS 6 Adoption Rates Soar Following Google Maps Release
redletterdave writes "The Dec. 12 reinstatement of Google Maps on iOS has apparently been enough for some of those reluctant users to finally make the upgrade to iOS 6. According to MoPub, the San Francisco-based mobile ad exchange that monitors more than 1 billion ad impressions a day and supports more than a dozen ad networks and 12,000 apps, there has been a 29 percent increase in unique iOS 6 users in the past five days following Google Maps' release on iOS. In fact, MoPub reports a 13 percent increase in iOS 6 users from last Monday to Wednesday alone, which would mean that nearly half of the converts to iOS 6 in the past week switched the very moment Google Maps' standalone app hit the App Store."
Now how about getting the version for iPads too?
Does this take into account the fact that the iPhone was released in China last weekend and may have caused a spike?
Ummm no it didn't. It was because of the iPhone being released in China. Check Macrumors (where I saw the original and correction).
But I didn't want to chance the security vulns iOS6 fixed over iOS5
Let's not forget that this their last week on earth, so why not splurge a little?
I do tend to wonder, if Google Maps is so pivotal to the widespread adoption of iOS 6, would we begin to see a lot of people moving toward Android phones if Google removed their maps from the iOS App Store? I know Google Maps (and its turn-by-turn navigation) was a very important feature when considering purchasing my own phone.
http://www.macrumors.com/2012/12/20/ios-6-adoption-uptick-due-to-iphone-5-release-in-china-not-google-maps/ Ad network and analytics firm Chitika claims it has seen no significant increase in iOS 6 adoption in the U.S. and Canada. A company analyst believes the MoPub data (which was international, rather than domestic) we wrote about earlier today was affected by the recent launch of the iPhone 5 in China, rather than the release of Google Maps. This past weekend, Apple issued a press release bragging that it had sold more than two million iPhone 5 units in China over the first three days of availability.
I'm most impressed with the reach of this news. It's pretty amazing that such a story could make its way through the 'casual' iOS user population and subsequently cause the users to take action on and affect real world analytics in such a short period of time.
It was the release in China..not google maps.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc strikes again.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
have the self-respect to pull this piece of bullshit from their front page, or will they just roll on to the next?
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.
ok, in case it's missing from our hosts files, can anyone provide the domain names MoPub is serving their ads from so we can include them in our hosts files?
Very much appreciated, thanks!
Would we begin to see a lot of people moving toward Android phones if Google removed their maps from the iOS App Store?
The funny thing is that at the highest levels, Google and Apple really do not care about each other the way the fans at the lowest level seem to.
Google just wants to make great data driven apps that in turn drive a lot of data their way. If Android falters they will shrug and simply keep producing apps for the leading platforms. Obviously they would prefer Android to keep doing well because they collect more data that way.
Apple just wants to make and sell hardware as well made as they can, continuing down the road of integrating software and hardware to the greatest degree possible. They are happy to have well executed applications run on iOS; after all, it moves more hardware. It was pretty funny to watch people speculate on Slashdot that Google Maps would be blocked from the App Store when there were so many other mapping apps on the store already, and obviously Apple wants good applications because they help sell iOS devices.
So Google would not pull Google Maps from the App Store because it helps them, and Apple will not block it because it helps them.
But even if for some reason Google went nuts I don't think it would affect iOS much, there are too many other high quality mapping solutions already (including Apple's own maps).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
public transit directions are absolutely critical for me on a smartphone
If you really feel that way, you will be far better served using iOS going forward.
I have used Google Transit a LOT over the years. When you use it in multiple cities, or for a long time every day, you grow to realize that the data it's giving you is mediocre. Yes it generally works but it's often out of touch with the way buses are really running, and if you investigate where the data comes from it's all static files updated infrequently by the metro companies in each city.
A third party app can cover cities much better, integrating more deeply into the existing metro data stream. There's already an app for iOS called simply Transit (careful, more than one exist) that seems to have the same coverage Google Transit does, and has better presentation of transit data than Google. You not only get a list of possible transit combinations with stops and walking, but it also adds extra details like "this one is slower but has less walking". When scrolling through the segments of the selected route Transit does a great job of showing the route on the map, giving you the estimated departure and arrival times for the bus picking you up and dropping you off.
So already iOS users get better transit directions than Google Maps gives you, and the transit situation on iOS will only get better as time goes by. With Apple directing people to third party apps there is a TON of motivation to build a really good custom metro app for every city because customers will be herded right to your app outside the crowded app store.
It's funny that so many people talk about how Apple should allow you to chose a browser or mail client (which would be useful) but then claim it's pointless or unnecessary to have a map where you can chose the best application to give you transit directions. Why should that area be immune from letting third parties do a better job, especially when it's just not possible to do the best job for every city across the globe?
Especially combined with the trick of asking Siri "Take me to *LocationX* via transit" you have simple one-click transit routing to anywhere quickly and with the best transit directions you can get.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's funny that so many people talk about how Apple should allow you to chose a browser or mail client (which would be useful) but then claim it's pointless or unnecessary to have a map where you can chose the best application to give you transit directions. Why should that area be immune from letting third parties do a better job, especially when it's just not possible to do the best job for every city across the globe?
Unlike Apple, Google doesn't block third party apps that compete with its own services and there *are* third party mapping programs on Android.
From the same continent, an even worse story about the dangers of Google Maps - sending people the wrong way down a dangerously narrow one way road. It comes with a similar warning from police not to rely on Google Maps.
Apple's error has affected a handful of people (one that we know of), while Google's error affects a great deal more people since it's a road along the sea-side where a huge amount of tourist traffic exists.
So can we infer from your post that Google Maps is a fiasco a decade in the making? I would say Google Maps works pretty well, as does Apple Maps - but that mapping is a hard thing to get quite right. When you start singling out errors it throws egg on the face of every map company, not just the one you are targeting (and in this case most the egg did not even land on Apple).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Unlike Apple, Google doesn't block third party apps that compete with its own services
Apple doesn't do that any more either. There are scores of map, mail and browser apps in the App Store.
They may be limiting the number of fart apps, a great loss to the market I'm sure.
there *are* third party mapping programs on Android.M
And they will suck utterly compared to the third party transit apps on iOS, because they are lost in the middle of all the other applications. With Google providing you mediocre transit data in Maps and not showing you better alternatives, how many people will search out transit apps?
Meanwhile Apple directs users in a geographic region (city) to specific applications that can help them. That means as an app developer you are far more likely to earn back the cost of developing a great transit app even for a medium sized metro area.
We have seen a huge increase in the quality of metro apps on iOS in just a matter of months, exactly because of this effect. This effect will multiply rapidly on iOS while on Android very few developers will bother to try and compete against Google on transit.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
reticent =/= reluctant ;>)
"reticent" $\notequal$ "reluctant"
reticent â reluctant
.
How many ways can I type that "not-equal sign"? (not in unicode, obvviously damn it) Seriously, to paraphrase Inigo Montoya, that word in this article summary does NOT mean what they think it means.
Reticent can mean modest or keeping something to oneself, or keeping quiet about something.
Reluctant can mean not willing or inclined to do something, which is the meaning that must have been intended.
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Seriously, do they need a high-schooler like me to be an editor who's not afraid of looking up word and perhaps actually editing the content and form of the submissions and cleaning things up and really behaving like an editor? I would seriously do it if asked
.
My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die! [temporary sig, please wait while construction continues]
First look at how many map and map related titles there are for iOS and then tell me again how they're being blocked. There are almost too many to choose from. The selection is quite granular.
I said in the release article here, you don't see Apple building Microsoft a start menu app and then giving it out for free BECAUSE THAT WOULD BE STUPID! There you go, helping out their #1 competitor.
For comparisons sake, it would be interesting to know how many people adopted ios6 in the week prior to the release of google maps. Need a baseline to understand the context, but can't do much with it by itself
reticent =/= reluctant
"reticent" $\notequal$ "reluctant"
reticent â reluctant
.
How many ways can I type that "not-equal sign"?
Normal people would write <> or !=
re:Normal people would write "\gr \lt" or "!="
I don't think that less-than-or-greater-than would apply because the use of "lessthan" or "greaterthan" implies the presence of a partial ordering, and though words are ordered alphabetically, I am talking about inequality. "a \lt \gt b" (sort of) implies "a \lt b" or "b \lt a", which also implies some ordering. You are, however, correct that "!=" would also work and be correctly interpreted. The fact that I could not get the unicode "not-equal sign" to be accepted by slash-dot is why I went ahead and used the $LaTeX$ symbol and the wacky "=/=" to get the visual effect of the "not equal" symbol and spelling it out. But I must admit that I have never been accused of being normal, so even though normal people might write or "greater-than" or "less-than", I would not.
My iDevice was running the least-outdated version of iOS 4 and not being too bothered about these things I never got round to updating it. Also, I was a bit leery about installing a new major release until the early adopters had suffered through the kinks. The release of the Google map app, which requires iOS 5.something or later was enough reason to finally upgrade.
Funnily enough, the french word for reluctant is "reticent". (Arrrgh, it's 2012 and Slashdot still doesn't do UTF8 properly...)
Maybe the original poster has fallen for this common faux pas. The less said about the editors the better.
Gracias, I mean >! I did not know that. Perhaps the french nuance does play a role in this. It's always been one of my pet peeves (reticent v. reluctant, lose v. loose) but I will try to be more understanding now that I realize the possible source of this confusion. (and re the UTF8, I agree. That was part of my usage of $\noteq$ instead of the unicode "not equal symbol".)
I wrote Merci with french quotes around it, but slashdot's html parser ate up my $\lt$ and $\gt$ angle-braces!
I called Shenanigans on this even before I got to the many refutations in the comments. iOS 6 was the first major iOS release available over the air (as opposed to only via iTunes). Apple pushed the upgrade availability out to all compatible devices on day one. No Android-style staggered roll-out. No BS post-release carrier acceptance testing. Something like 50% in the first week after the iOS 6 release i.e. half of all iOS 6 capable devices ever sold were upgraded in seven days. People were already upgraded by the time the "Apple Maps Sucks!" conventional wisdom came to light.
I imagine at this point, many of the unupgraded units are, in fact, retired or otherwise non-functional, and most of the remaining devices are jailbroken; their owners are intentionally remaining on iOS 5 as there's no jailbreak yet for iPhones and iPads running iOS 6.
Normal people wouldn't be on slashdot.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
did you think Apple found china? By using google maps of course
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Assuming this is related to Chinese release, does that mean there are only +-6 million (100/30 * 2,000,000) iOS 6 devices globally? That seems very low.
This "study" is basically a graph with no source and no numbers backing it.
The OP was about an ad agency monitoring real time traffic. Which one would you rather believe? Apple shills trying to discredit Google or real-time traffic?
ummm....no it doesn't.
admit that there are no real alternative browsers
In order to do that I would have to believe that every website needed a fast Javascript engine.
Since they don't, you should really stop digging.
I use alternate browsers for a variety of things. It's absurd to claim there are none, since a huge part of the reason to use something like Chrome is you prefer the controls, bookmarking or how multiple browser windows work.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I jailbreak my IOS device for one very important reason: /etc/hosts. This is VERY important to me. If I access an internet resource, there's nothing stopping it from telling my device, "Hey, also get this other resource without asking the user for permission!" In other words, it speaks on my behalf. My right to free speech also means freedom from compulsory speech. /etc/hosts means that I can control which resources are accessed on my behalf.
Apple (and all other money-making enterprises) hate this notion because it interferes with their potential profit. This is why we have to rely on jailbreaking to restore these free speech rights. My IOS5 device is jailbroken, but I cannot get an untethered jailbreak for IOS6.
IANAL. Doesn't matter. This is a philosophical issue.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
This is why we have to rely on jailbreaking to restore these free speech rights.
Au contraire! You could just not buy the device, free speech is easily controlled from your wallet.
I don't think that less-than-or-greater-than would apply because the use of "lessthan" or "greaterthan" implies the presence of a partial ordering, and though words are ordered alphabetically, I am talking about inequality.
Most people around here know a bit of coding, and in (among others) BASIC, Pascal and SQL the <> operator means not-equal-to. The != comes from C-like languages.
Your content disproves your subject line. Even if we take as given the absurd notion that access to /etc/hosts is somehow intrinsically tied to "free speech" (it *can* be used to affect speech, granted, but Apple doesn't do anything that would trigger that, so it's a non-sequitur claim on your part), the fact that you engage in a work-around demonstrates that using iOS 6, in fact, does not mean the very thing you claim it does.
Ironically, telling people what OS to use or not use, actually is much more of a free speech issue than the one you brought up.