What our data says
There is a workaround for this, at least for iOS. Safari on iOS 26 will report an iOS version of 18.6 or 18.7, but it also reports a Safari version of 26.x. This isn’t as useful on macOS, where Safari 26 could be running on macOS 14 Sonoma, macOS 15 Sequoia, or macOS 26 Tahoe. But on iOS, Safari 26 only runs on iOS 26, so it’s a useful proxy for identifying the operating system version.
| iOS 18 Safari pageviews in 2024 | iOS 26 Safari pageviews in 2025 | |
|---|---|---|
| October | 24.9% | 22.1% |
| November | 35.1% | 26.3% |
| December | 75.9% | 45.3% |
For these stats, we’ve grouped together all devices claiming to run Safari 26 on an iPhone, regardless of whether the underlying iOS version is listed as 18.x or 26.x (some apps or third-party browsers using Apple’s built-in WebKit engine can still identify themselves as “Safari,” though Chrome, Edge, and Mozilla Firefox at least report their own user-agent strings). We’ve compared those numbers to all devices claiming to run Safari 18 on iPhones claiming to run iOS 18. This does screen out users running third-party browsers on iPhones, but Statcounter data suggests that the ratio of Safari to Chrome users on iOS hasn’t changed much over that period.
What’s interesting is that for October of 2024 and October of 2025—the first full month that iOS 18 and iOS 26 were available, respectively—adoption numbers don’t look all that different. About 25 percent of iPhone pageviews across all Condé Nast were served to devices running Safari on iOS 18, compared to 22 percent for iOS 26 the following year. That is a step down, but it suggests that early adopters weren’t repelled en masse by Liquid Glass or anything else about the operating system.
But the gap widens over the next two months, which does suggest that “normal” users aren’t in a rush to get the update. By December of 2024, our data shows that 76 percent of iPhone Safari pageviews were going to iOS 18 devices, compared to just 45 percent for iOS 26 in December of 2025.