What does our data say?
There is a workaround for this, at least for iOS. Safari on iOS 26 will report an iOS version of 18.6 or 18.7, but it also reports a Safari version of 26.x. This is not as useful on macOS, where Safari 26 can run on macOS 14 Sonoma, macOS 15 Sequoia, or macOS 26 Tahoe. But on iOS, Safari 26 Only Runs on iOS 26, so it is a useful proxy for identifying the operating system version.
| iOS 18 Safari Pageviews in 2024 | iOS 26 Safari Pageviews in 2025 | |
|---|---|---|
| october | 24.9% | 22.1% |
| november | 35.1% | 26.3% |
| December | 75.9% | 45.3% |
For these statistics, we’ve grouped together all devices claiming to run Safari 26 on the iPhone, regardless of whether the underlying iOS version is listed as 18.x or 26.x (some apps that use Apple’s built-in WebKit engine or third-party browsers may still identify themselves as “Safari”, although Chrome, Edge, and Mozilla Firefox at least report their own user-agent strings). We compared those numbers to all devices claiming to run Safari 18 on iPhones claiming to run iOS 18. It screens out users running third-party browsers on iPhones, but StatCounter data shows the proportion of Safari and Chrome users on iOS hasn’t changed much over that period.
Interestingly, for October of 2024 and October of 2025 – the first full months that iOS 18 and iOS 26 were available, respectively – the adoption numbers don’t look different at all. About 25 percent of all Condé Nast iPhone pageviews were served on devices running Safari on iOS 18, compared to 22 percent for iOS 26 the following year. This is a step down, but it shows that early adopters were not rejected. collectively By liquid glass or something else about the operating system.
But this gap widens further in the next two months does Suggesting that “normal” users are in no rush to get the update. By December of 2024, our data shows that 76 percent of iPhone Safari pageviews were going to iOS 18 devices, compared to only 45 percent for iOS 26 in December of 2025.
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