iOS 10 slower off the uptake mark

iPhone and iPad owners adopted Apple's iOS 10 at a slower tempo during its first dozen days than they did last year's upgrade, according to data from an analytics vendor.

At the 12-day mark, iOS 10 accounted for 41.9% of all iOS editions detected by Mixpanel, whose metrics platform is widely used by mobile app developers to track usage and user engagement.

That was significantly lower than the 52.4% accumulated by iOS 9 last year at the same post-release point, but slightly higher than iOS 8's 40.6% in September 2014.

The modern record for iOS uptake was in 2013, when iOS 7 -- a major overhaul of the operating system's user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) -- captured a 65.5% share in its opening 12 days.

Two weeks ago, Mixpanel predicted that iOS 10 would break the 50% tape within 11 days; the company's forecast fell short.

Other data showed that the 4.7-in. iPhone 7 (3%) outpaced the larger 5.5-in. iPhone 7 Plus (1%) by 3 to 1 so far. Together, the two new models accounted for 4% of all iPhones tallied by Mixpanel in the first nine days of availability. The larger iPhone 7 Plus made up 25% of all just-introduced devices.

That last number should be encouraging to Apple.

While this year's total was only up slightly from 2015's 3.7% -- 3% for the iPhone 6S, 0.7% for the iPhone 6S Plus -- and, not surprisingly, off 2014's whopping 5.7% (4.9% for the iPhone 6, 0.8% for the iPhone 6 Plus) during the same stretch of time, the percentage of the higher-priced 5.5-in. phone was the largest since that size's introduction two years ago.

In 2014, the larger iPhone 6S Plus made up 23% of the new models after nine days; the year before, the iPhone 6 Plus accounted for an even smaller 16% of the total of iPhone 6 + 6 Plus.