Apple no doubt suffered some humiliation at the hands of Google this past week. Google finally released their own maps app for iOS, after Apple purged them from the ecosystem with the release of iOS 6 – and it was a huge hit. As you probably remember, Apple replaced Google Maps with their own Apple Maps, an inferior product that drew wide criticism from users.
The silver lining for Apple regarding the Google Maps release was that maybe, just maybe it would finally push people who were on the fence into upgrading to iOS 6.
But initially reports indicated that wasn’t the case. Google Maps’ effect on iOS 6 adoption seemed negligible, at best. Chitika found that in the first day, the adoption rate climbed less than 0.2%. Not exactly the boost that was expected.
Apparently, we simply needed to give people time – like a couple of days. A new report suggests that Google Maps actually is having an impact on iOS 6 adoption – and it’s significant.
This data comes to us from MoPub (via BGR) They looked at around 12,000 of the iOS applications in their network and saw an astounding 29% increase in iOS 6 adoption in the first five days after Google released its Google Maps for iPhone app.
“We observed since the launch of Google Maps for iOS 6 a 30 percent increase in unique iOS 6 users, and we think it’s related to Google Maps,” said MoPub CEO Jim Payne. “It verifies the hypothesis that people were actually holding back to upgrade until Google Maps was available.”
Of course, this data comes from the clients of a specific company, and the data that pegged Google Maps as an exaggerated motivator also came from a specific analytics company. The point being these are not necessarily 100% representative of all iOS users at large.
But it does suggest that iOS 6 adoption was spurred on by the re-addition of Google Maps to the iOS ecosystem – eventually.
Google Maps for iPhone app was a big hit among iOS users in general. That we can be sure of. Google says that it saw over 10 million downloads in its first 48 hours in the App Store.