Apple’s media events often follow a pattern. The company usually talks about numbers and retail stores first before jumping on to announce new devices. That’s exactly what it did today as well, at its iPhone event. Apple CEO Tim Cook announced during the keynote that the 700 millionth iOS device is set to be shipped by October, while not discounting the possibility that it might actually be shipped sooner than that.
Cook claimed that based on the sheer number of iOS devices out there, when iOS 7 is released on September 18th, it will become the “most popular operating system” in the world, literally overnight. While the claim might be a tad optimistic, there’s no doubt about the fact that Apple’s iOS devices are some of the most popular devices that are coveted by customers all around the globe. Since Apple is the only company that manufactures these devices, we don’t see high fragmentation of iOS like we see with Android. Google announced last week that it has activated over 1 billion Android devices, but a large number of them are still running OS versions that are over two years old, that’s because Android devices are developed by a wide variety of manufacturers and every device isn’t capable of running the latest OS version.