With just less than a week to go for the release, AdDuplex has released the numbers for September 2021 highlighting the market share of different versions of the Windows desktop operating system. For those unaware, AdDuplex is the largest cross-promotion network for Windows Store apps and games empowering developers and publishers to promote their apps for free by helping each other. According to the report, the test version of Windows 11 (Insiders) is already installed on 1.3% of PCs (with the Microsoft Store). This is not a significant increase considering that Windows 11 (Insiders) had a market share of 0.9% at the end of July. In contrast, test versions of Windows 10 (Insiders) have a 0.3% market share. Currently, the most popular version of Windows is Windows 10 21H1, also known as Windows 10 May 2021 Update (May 2021 Update), which is running on more than 38% of PCs. This version of Windows has also seen the biggest jump since July which saw 26% of Windows 10 PCs running 21H1. Windows 10 21H1 is followed by the previous version, Windows 10 20H2 (October 2020 Update) released in Fall 2020 in the second place with a 36.1% market share. The third position is taken by Windows 10 2004 (May 2020 Update) with a market share of 14.5%. On the other hand, Windows 10 1909 has a decent market share of 4.3%, while Windows 10 1903 claims a 2.1% market share. It was observed that over 90% of Windows 10/11 PCs are running versions of Windows that were released in either 2020 or 2021. “This report is based on data collected from approximately 5,000 Windows Store apps running AdDuplex SDK v.2 (and later). The raw data analyzed was collected during the day of September 27, 2021 (UTC time), unless otherwise indicated,” AdDuplex states. It also states that approximately 60,000 PCs were surveyed, although there is no clarity if the figures are a direct extension of data collected from around 5,000 apps from the Microsoft Store (formerly known as “Windows Store”) running AdDuplex SDK v.2 (and higher). So, it’s doesn’t provide a clear picture of all the PCs in the world. Having said this, it would be interesting to see how the numbers change after Microsoft releases Windows 11 on October 5th.
