Are folks avoiding iOS 26 due to Liquid Glass? It’s sophisticated.

Last week, information concerning the adoption charges for Apple’s iOS 26 replace began making the rounds. The new replace, these experiences claim, was being put in at dramatically decrease charges than previous iOS updates. And whereas we are able to’t infer something about why folks may select to not set up iOS 26, the conclusion being jumped to is that iPhone customers are merely determined to keep away from the redesigned Liquid Glass person interface.

The numbers do, in actual fact, look dangerous: Statcounter knowledge for January suggests that the assorted variations of iOS 26 are working on simply 16.6 p.c of all gadgets, in comparison with round 70 p.c for the assorted variations of iOS 18. The iOS 18.7 replace alone—launched similtaneously iOS 26.0 in September for individuals who needed the safety patches however weren’t able to step as much as a brand-new OS—seems to be working on practically one-third of all iOS gadgets.

Those unique experiences have been picked up and repeated as a result of they inform a probably attention-grabbing story of the “huge if true” selection: that customers’ aversion to the Liquid Glass design is so intense and widespread that it’s actively protecting customers away from the working system. But after inspecting our personal site visitors numbers, in addition to some technical modifications made in iOS 26, it seems Statcounter’s knowledge is dramatically undercounting the variety of iOS 26 gadgets within the wild.

We’ve taken a high-level have a look at all iPhone site visitors throughout all Condé Nast web sites for October, November, and December of 2025 and in contrast it to site visitors from October, November, and December of 2024. This knowledge means that iOS 26 is being adopted extra slowly than iOS 18 was the 12 months earlier than—roughly 76 p.c of all iPhone pageviews got here from gadgets working iOS 18 in December of 2024, in comparison with about 45 p.c for iOS 26 in December of 2025.

That’s not as cataclysmic a dropoff as Statcounter’s knowledge suggests, even earlier than contemplating different mitigating elements—iOS 26 dropped assist for 2018’s iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR, for instance, whereas iOS 18 ran on each iPhone that might run iOS 17.