For those curious, the world-wide attempt by Microsoft at updating Windows Phone to version 7.5 aka "Mango" seems to be hitting a steady pace of about 1.5% per day. Using the app 'I'm a WP7!' which has data sampled from a massive 83,527 users, we can see that Mango (builds 7720, 7721) is now on 20% of devices the world over (17% in the U.S.).
If you throw in the developer and beta builds of Mango, we're at nearly 30% of those 83,000 users, putting us up about 12% from a week ago.
While that official number of 20% may seem low, remember that Microsoft is doing a controlled update process, meaning only a small percentage of users will actually get an update notification. That number has increased this week, but we imagine it will still be another 10 days before we hit 50% of users on Mango. What we are seeing though is a consistent and steady daily increase in those upgrading to Windows Phone 7.5, much faster than any previous build.
Want some perspective via our competition? Android's latest version of the OS titled 'Gingerbread' (2.3x) was released in December of 2010. As of yesterday, they are hovering at about 38% devices world wide on that OS build--that's 10 months out. Microsoft, meanwhile, has managed to get 20% of its users on their latest version of the OS in 10 days. Clearly, we see who the real winner is here.
Edit: We should point out that it's not so much about numbers of users here that's the difference between Windows Phone and Android, but the model for update distribution is vastly different. Microsoft has taken a much more direct approach to ensure that those 10 devices on 50 carriers world wide were all on the same page at the same time. Scale matters, but the update model here is the key differentiating factor between the two platforms. If you threw in a million HD7s to the mix, it would change very little since that same update is still approved for a million phones. We're just saying, we're not the Samsung Infuse 4G.
Grab 'I'm a WP7!' for free here in the Marketplace to add your stats.
