Apple SVP of Marketing Phil Schiller announces 300M devices now on iOS 6 and above

Along with an update for iOS devices, Apple has also announced that there are now 300M devices on iOS 6 just 5 months after its release. This means that there has been an increase of 100M devices running iOS 6 over the last three months including upgrades and sales.

Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing said today that “iOS 6 is the world’s most advanced mobile operating system, and with nearly 300 million iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices on iOS 6 in just five months, it may be the most popular new version of an OS in history.”

Since there have been some 500M total iOS devices sold, that means that over 60% of all devices are running iOS 6.

The last time that Apple announced numbers for iOS 6 adoption was in October of last year, when CEO Tim Cook said that there were 200 million devices running iOS 6. Just last week, Apple reported that it had 250M iCloud users across iOS 5 and iOS 6, as they’re the only two major versions to support the service. Because Apple doesn’t break down the numbers between the two versions, it’s impossible to tell how many of those 250M iCloud users are accessing it via iOS 6, but our guess would be a lot.

Apple announced that it had sold 75M iOS devices in the first quarter of 2013 alone, and all of those had iOS 6 pre-installed. Apple saw an enormous uptick in iOS adoption with iOS 6 as it was the first full upgrade available directly over the air. In the first week of availability over 100M of Apple’s devices were upgraded to iOS 6. Judging by the numbers of device sales, the upgraders from iOS 5 have tapered off and the growth of iOS 6 is now coming primarily from sales of new devices.

If developer statistics are accurate, however, iOS 6 adoption is already over 80%, meaning that most of the hundreds of millions of devices out there have access to almost every new feature of Apple’s mobile OS. Certainly a draw for developers wishing to take advantage of the latest advancements like iCloud and more.