According to data released by AppLovin, the iPhone 6 has globally been preferred over its phablet counterpart, the iPhone 6 Plus, with usage averaging out to a wide 80-20 split. However, this is not the case in Asia Pacific where the iPhone 6 Plus is more popular than in countries like North America, Western Europe and Australia.
Phablets have tended to fare better in Asia-Pacific countries – where phablet sales equal that of laptops and tablets combined – due to which iPhone 6 Plus usage is consistently over 35 per cent higher than iPhone 6 usage.
The one exception is South Korea, where the ratio of iPhone 6 usage to that of iPhone 6 Plus is 71 to 29.
The iPhone 6 Plus also sold out almost instantly around the world, even when the supply constrained iPhone 6 was still available to order, the study notes, although this could be because the initial supply of the 6 Plus was considerably less.
“Since the 6 Plus is Apple’s first entry into the ‘phablet’ category, it would make sense that they might start with a small pool to test demand,” the research explained.
“No one expected iPhone 6 Plus to match or surpass the heights of iPhone 6, but usage was more robust than expected,” AppLovin concluded in a statement.
It recently came to light that stocks of Apple’s iPhone 6 line are running low in India, as the US vendor instead focuses on building up inventory to support its launch in the lucrative Chinese market.
iOS 8
The study also found that not as many users have updated to iOS 8 as they did when iOS 7 came out, and this could be for a combination of reasons, including “hiccups in the updating process that concerned some would-be upgraders” and because users simply did not have the required 5GB of available storage space.
However, adoption is likely to go up as more people switch to iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.
Last month, it was reported that Apple’s growth rate had almost halved from 26 per cent in Q3 2013 to 16 per cent in the most recent period. “Apple is finding it harder to achieve growth this year, despite a successful recent launch of the new iPhone 6 portfolio,” Strategy Analytics director Ken Hyers commented at the time.
