iOS 7 By The Numbers: 200 Million Downloads In 5 Days, 64% Adoption Rate, 20 Million iTunes Radio Listeners

In San Francisco today, Apple shared some numbers during its keynote. Only five days after the iOS 7 release, 200 million devices ran the new operating system. It represents a 64 percent adoption rate. “This blows away the other guys,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said on stage.

As always, this massive adoption rate is one of Apple’s major strengths. While many believed that iOS 7 could be disorienting to iOS 6 users, the adoption rate is pretty similar to older iOS releases. Users can now update over the air, carriers don’t have a say and many older iPhones and iPads are compatible. All those key elements make the iOS adoption rate much faster than the Android or Windows Phone adoption rates.

Apple introduced a new feature in iTunes both on the mobile devices and on computers, iTunes Radio. For this feature alone, Apple touts 20 million listeners. While 20 million listeners is much less impressive than the 200 million iOS 7 user number, many of these users were already listening to music through Pandora. We don’t know whether those numbers are above or below Apple’s expectations. It’s a good start, but clearly not enough to compete with Pandora.

As a reminder, iTunes Radio is not available in every country where Apple sells iPhones. Only a fraction of iPhone, iPad and iTunes users can use iTunes Radio. As content deals are hard to sign, getting iTunes Radio into everyone’s hands will be the next difficult step for Apple.