Omni Software Update Stats
Anyone who runs a recent Omni Group application will know (because they make it very clear) that their software update process sends some information along when it checks for new versions. For transparency’s sake you can see what is sent, etc, so there is no personal information and nothing evil going on. If there were, users of Little Snitch could soon blow the whistle.
Anyway, Omni make this information visible on their site at http://update.omnigroup.com/ and as a developer this is not only interesting but very useful. It seems most people are using Tiger, with only around 10% on Panther (Mac OS X 10.3.x) and under 1% on Jaguar (10.2.x). It also shows things like CPU type and speed, number of processors, installed memory, etc.
Of course this is limited to people who use Omni Group’s software at a version that reports this information, all of which only runs on Mac OS X, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were roughly representative of Mac OS X’s user base as a whole. As far as I’m concerned, I’m going to continue to support Panther and later with my apps until their next major versions (i.e. 2.0), both of which are a while off, unless something technical means I can’t do that.
December 5th, 2005 at 2:36 am
Very tasty data.
I’m really surprised that it’s only %10. Our numbers at PF show 20%, but I think that’s just because of schools who haven’t caught up with the times yet.
Makes you wonder if spending all that time testing in Panther and being limited to Panther technologies is worth it. Thanks Steve!
December 5th, 2005 at 2:45 am
That’s interesting. I was thinking this data could have something like 10% error, just because these stats would be from Omni’s latest-ish generation of apps not all of them, and if someone doesn’t keep their apps up to date then they probably don’t have their OS up to date either and so Omni won’t have the data.
However, at WWDC last June, Steve Jobs put it at something like 50% for Tiger (I don’t remember what the rest was made up of, but it was mostly Panther) – and said that by the end of the year they expected most people to be on Tiger – something like 80 – 90%. I could be wrong, check out the webcast for that, but Omni’s stuff seems to agree.
This does tend to show that Mac users are good at staying up to date, which I think differentiates them from Windows users to a large degree, with everyone from ordinary users to corporations sticking with a “safe” version, the one that came installed or has been out for at least a couple of years.