iOS 26’s failure shows what happens when you take customers for granted

I had a good time last week digging through OS adoption data and recreating my glory days as a high-school mathematician. But the numbers are decidedly less fun for Tim Cook. According to research by StatCounter, iOS 26’s adoption rate is less than a quarter of iOS 18’s at the same time in its release cycle, and that’s bad news for the iPhone.

Why aren’t people installing iOS 26? The short answer is “Liquid Glass,” since the new design language has been so widely vilified that Apple was forced into an uncharacteristic backtrack to let people turn off some of its transparency effects. But if you’ll indulge me, there’s a longer answer that I’d like to explore a little.

More than any other tech company, Apple’s success is built on loyalty. Its products tend to be more expensive, spec for spec, than those made by rivals, but customers buy them anyway because they trust the experience will be better and they want the company to prosper. Loyal Apple users view a walled-garden product ecosystem as a plus, not a minus, because they don’t want to leave. Even the Apple Store, which turned up anachronistically at the start of the century as other businesses were offloading their brick-and-mortar obligations, makes perfect sense when you understand that its purpose is not to sell units, but to evangelize the Apple lifestyle. It’s a loyalty factory.

But a loyalty-based business model cuts both ways. As we see so often in online discourse, a strongly loyal user base will stand by its favored company, even rushing to its defense when things go wrong. Right up until they don’t.

Provided the missteps are isolated, you should be okay. Apple Maps, for instance, was an embarrassing fumble when it launched in 2012, but at the time it felt like a rare mistake rather than a symptom of something larger. In recent years, by contrast, Apple’s software failures have become the rule, not the exception.

Some of these have been a failure of quality control: a willingness to announce, or even release, software that isn’t fit for purpose. Many of the software features badged as Apple Intelligence fit in this category, as does Siri 1.0, whose performance seems unbelievably to be getting worse. Others represent the opposite problem: the inability to get a needed product out there, exemplified by Siri 2.0. As my colleague Jason Snell argues, 2025 may come to be remembered for what Apple didn’t deliver. Real artists ship.

But there’s a third category, which doesn’t represent mistakes at all. These are the instances of deliberate enshittification: moments of greed, arrogance, and the belief that customer loyalty insulates the company from consequences. Such as the App Store becoming riddled with ads a few years back, a move which was so unpopular that Apple decided to do the same thing with Apple News, Stocks, and (as of next year) Maps. It’s even been caught pushing ads in iMovie. Why? Because the company thinks it can.

It’s debatable whether the egregious design of last year’s OS updates falls under the category of arrogance or incompetence; perhaps it’s both. But the takeaway for Apple should be that customer loyalty is finite, and there are consequences when you consistently lower your quality-control standards. When your entire business is built on people liking you, it’s best not to take them for granted.

Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.

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And with that, we’re done for this week’s Apple Breakfast. If you’d like to get regular roundups, sign up for our newsletters, including our new email from The Macalope–an irreverent, humorous take on the latest news and rumors from a half-man, half-mythical Mac beast. You can also follow us on Facebook, Threads, Bluesky, or X for discussion of breaking Apple news stories. See you next Monday, and stay Appley.