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Dozens of sites reported this week that Windows 7 usage is "skyrocketing."
The reports are based on charts from a notoriously unreliable source.
More likely explanation: Changes in iOS 26 are confusing analytics trackers.
My news feed was absolutely overwhelmed this week with headlines telling me that Windows 7's market share "skyrocketed" last month, as users just said no to Windows 11.
Then I realized it's the first of the month and of course all those stories are appearing because Statcounter Global Stats just released its "market share" reports for the previous month. Tech reporters cannot resist charts like this one any more than Mr. Bigglesworth can say no to a bag of fresh catnip.
Did 100 million+ people really switch to Windows 7 last month? Seriously? Screenshot by Ed Bott/ZDNET
Whoa! If you believe those numbers, nearly 10% of all worldwide traffic from Windows PCs in September 2025 came from PCs running Windows 7, an operating system that has been unsupported and obsolete for six years.
Seriously?
Also: Microsoft has lost its way
Well, like I said, "if you believe those numbers..." If you have no critical thinking skills at all, then of course you will simply write that obviously tens and maybe hundreds of millions of people have scoured the internet, found a bootleg copy of a 16-year-old operating system, and installed it on their PCs. And then you will make up a story about why that happened.
Of course, none of that happened. Those numbers are complete nonsense. StatCounter's measurements are notoriously inaccurate and unreliable. They bounce around in weird ways that are literally incomprehensible, and they prove absolutely nothing about any kind of "market share," as I've written more times than I care to remember. If you need a refresher, go read this post.
But what about the rest of the story?
Anyway, in their haste to unquestioningly report these unbelievable numbers, those tech journalists all missed an even bigger story.
It's right there in this month's Statcounter charts. Just go pull up the Operating System Market Share Worldwide chart for 2025, as I did here.
Why did Windows suddenly become more popular and iOS traffic plunge? Screenshot by Ed Bott/ZDNET
In May 2025, the gap between traffic from Windows PCs (the blue line) and devices running iOS (the gray line) was almost exactly 7%. In the five months since then, according to the same pile of Statcounter GS data that all those other stories relied on, Windows has become insanely more popular, and a huge number of people have given up on their iPhones.
Also: My favorite iOS 26 feature makes screenshots even more useful - and it's easy to enable
According to Statcounter's data, iOS has lost about 20% of its "market share" since the start of the year, going from 18.11% in January to 14.5% in September. The gap between Windows PCs and iOS devices is now 16%.
That's about a 9% shift in a matter of months, which seems curiously close to the inexplicable explosion of popularity in Windows 7 -- and equally unlikely.
So, what happened here?
This isn't just a Statcounter problem.
When I went to the website of the US Government's Digital Analytics Program, which tracks visits to websites run by the Federal government, I found a similar pattern of data, with Windows (and Windows 7 in particular) showing a weird surge in popularity over the past few months -- Year-to-date traffic from Windows devices is about 32.7%, but that number shot up to 38.1% in the month of September and to 41% in the seven days ending as visits from devices running iOS dropped about the same amount.
That suggests that whatever is causing these weird measurements has something to do with how those visits are being recorded in web analytics logs. The most likely answer is pretty obvious if you think about it for a minute.
Also: Can't upgrade your Windows 10 PC? You have 2 weeks to act - and 5 options
All those lines were flat and static through the month of May. Then, something happened: iOS 26 -- which, not coincidentally, seriously messed with version numbers (going from 18 to 26 in one jump) and added new privacy protections that, among other things, froze the user agent string in Safari.
The Developer Beta of iOS 26 and macOS 26 was released on June 9, 2025, the same day as WWDC. The Public Beta arrived on July 24, 2025. Release candidates showed up in early September, and the final public release of iOS 26 and macOS 26 was on Sept. 15, 2025.
Map those numbers to the chart above and you can see the supposed drop in usage for iOS as the population of devices running iOS 26 slowly expands, starting in June and growing bigger at a steady clip in August and September. That's exactly what you would expect if traffic from those devices were mistakenly being counted as if it was coming from PCs running an ancient version of Windows.
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There are probably other factors at work here, but you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to find the most likely culprit.
Can we all agree that these charts are useless and the underlying data is garbage?
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.