Apple's engineers are apparently ramping up their testing of iOS 7, as evidenced by Web traffic on Ars and various other sites. First noted by mobile content company Onswipe and followed up by MacRumors, devices that claim to be using iOS 7—coming from Apple's IP block in Cupertino—started showing up more and more around April 30. But while some describe it as a spike in traffic, our own analysis shows that traffic using iOS 7 is still relatively low.
Onswipe described the change as a "significant bump" in the number of visits from iPads and iPhones using iOS 7. In fact, Onswipe claims 75 percent of the visits to its partner sites came from iPhones, while iPads represented roughly a quarter of those visits. MacRumors posted its own traffic graph without explicit numbers, saying it has seen a "surge" in iOS 7 visits over the last week.
Upon analyzing Ars' traffic logs, we can see a trend closely mirroring that of MacRumors' (see graph at the top of this post). Around April 29-30, visits from devices claiming to be running iOS 7 began to pick up, and the numbers seem to be rising as the days go on. But we're talking about around 100 (or lower) on most days, with only the highest point going up past 100. For us, the large majority of those are on iPads—we can count the number of visits from iPhones or iPod touches on one hand.
Does that count as a significant spike? Not really, and it's not surprising, either. Apple's engineers have reportedly been working overtime—some even being pulled off OS X projects—in order to prep iOS 7 for demonstration at next month's Worldwide Developers Conference. The company is allegedly behind its own internal schedule when it comes to iOS 7, though sources claim the update is still on track for a fall release. If the OS is only just making its way into usable form, it shouldn't be a surprise to see some minor pickup in Web traffic. Otherwise, we're not holding our breath for anything crazy like an early release.
reader comments
25