Windows 11 Almost Doubles Usage Share to 16.1 Percent

The latest AdDuplex report shows that Windows 11 made significant usage share gains in the last month.

“Windows 11 has almost doubled its modern Windows PC usage share since the last time we checked [in] November 2021,” the report notes, adding that its numbers are based on a survey of about 60,000 PCs running Windows 10 and 11.

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In November, Windows 11 accounted for almost 9 percent of supported PCs out in the world; Windows 10 version 21H1 was at 36.3 percent and Windows 10 version 20H2 was close behind at 31.8 percent.

Now, Windows accounts for 16.1 percent of all supported PCs out in the world, up 7.5 percentage points. And while Windows 10 versions 21H1 and 20H2 are still the two most-used Windows versions, their respective shares have dropped, to 28.6 percent and 26.3 percent.

But here’s an interesting statistic: Windows 10 version 21H2, which was released shortly after Windows 11, accounts for 12.1 percent of PCs out in the world. “While Windows 11 has almost doubled its share,” AdDuplex adds, “Windows 10 21H2 more than tripled in the same period.”

These numbers don’t directly correlate, but what the heck: I’ll also point out that, using Microsoft’s latest 1.4 billion figure for overall Windows 10 and 11 PCs, we could roughly estimate that there are now 1.175 billion Windows 10 PCs/users (again, not the same thing, I know) and 225.4 million Windows 11 PCs/users out in the world. Sort of.

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Conversation 15 comments

  • sherlockholmes

    Premium Member
    28 January, 2022 - 9:35 am

    <p>Its so nice when you can use a non nonsense OS Like Windows 10 Enterprise 2019 LTSC until 2029 …..</p>

    • blue77star

      28 January, 2022 - 9:37 am

      <p>It is a best Windows 10 release. In fact I recommend Windows 10 Enterprise 2022 LTSC, no bloatware in it.</p>

      • sherlockholmes

        Premium Member
        28 January, 2022 - 9:39 am

        <p>Yeah but only supported for 5 years i think 2019 is supported for 10 years. </p>

        • epguy40

          31 January, 2022 - 3:52 pm

          <p>only the "normal" w10 enterprise ltsc <strong>2021</strong> (NOT 2022) edition had support up to 5 years BUT the "<strong>IoT</strong>" enterprise ltsc <strong>2021</strong> edition gets the full 10 year support until Jan. 2032</p>

  • Bart

    Premium Member
    28 January, 2022 - 9:43 am

    <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">“While Windows 11 has almost doubled its share,” AdDuplex adds, “Windows 10 21H2 more than tripled in the same period.”</span></p><p><br></p><p>Is this because of the restrictions of PCs being able to upgrade to Windows 11….?</p>

    • Paul Thurrott

      Premium Member
      28 January, 2022 - 10:22 am

      <p>I assume it’s related to whatever Microsoft blocks/checks, yeah. </p>

    • Donte

      28 January, 2022 - 10:56 am

      <p>I have actually surprised by what it will install on and what it wont. </p><p><br></p><p>I have installed it on both a i7-6700 (non K) which is Skylake 4C/8T, 6th generation and a i5-7500 (non k) Kabylake 7th generation, 4C/4T PC’s. </p><p><br></p><p>I thought from what I have read that you needed 8th generation and above. However I believe its the fact that both of those systems have motherboards that support TPM 2.0. An ASUS Z270 for the i7 and a Dell Optiplex 3050 for the i5.</p>

      • Sir_Timbit

        28 January, 2022 - 1:11 pm

        <p>Some 7th gen CPUs are supported, but not all… My Thinkpad T570 has an i7-7600 with vPro and Win11 installed without issue on that one. My desktop is an i5-7600 with no VPro. Win11 flat out refused to install on that one, without doing the reghack workarounds to disable the CPU/TPM checks. After that, Win11 installed OK, but obviously that’s unsupported.</p>

      • epguy40

        31 January, 2022 - 3:57 pm

        <p>for Asus Z270 or higher, it has TPM 2.0 support only with updated bios and/or updated Intel ME firmware.</p><p><br></p><p>for Z170 boards, TPM 2.0 support is either hit or miss (meaning it works or it does not) depending on the bios and intel me firmware version (and Intel CPU installed)</p>

  • kawaidon

    28 January, 2022 - 6:42 pm

    <p>I don’t understand why this does not include Windows 7 or XP. We all know there are plenty of people still using those. These percentages only are from Windows 10 and later. Why?</p>

    • hrlngrv

      Premium Member
      28 January, 2022 - 9:01 pm

      <p>Because the sampling is Store apps, and only Windows 10 and later can run most Store apps. Gotta wonder if there are even 100 apps remaining in the MSFT Store which Windows 8.x could use, but such apps wouldn’t use/run AdDuplex’s usage sampling system.</p>

  • hrlngrv

    Premium Member
    28 January, 2022 - 8:58 pm

    <p>Gotta wonder how unbiased AdDuplex sampling may be.</p><p><br></p><p>From AdDuplex itself,</p><p><br></p><h3>| About this report</h3><p>| <em>This report is based on data collected from around 5,000 Windows Store apps running</em></p><p>| <em>AdDuplex SDK v.2 (and higher). The raw data analyzed was collected over the day of</em></p><p>| <em>January 27th, 2022 (UTC time) unless otherwise stated.</em></p><p><br></p><p>IOW, sampling is from <strong><em>one day</em></strong> from 5,000-odd Windows Store apps. If MSFT is to be believed, 3 times as many Windows 11 users make regular use of the MSFT Store than Windows 10 users (and it wouldn’t come as a shock if damn few Windows 8.x users ever use the Store, and users of previous versions would NEVER use the Store). Given that, one has to suspect AdDuplex sampling could be seriously biased towards overstating Windows 11 usage.</p>

    • jhoersch

      Premium Member
      31 January, 2022 - 7:28 pm

      <p>I would take AdDuplex numbers with a shaker of salt – you’re absolutely right that the sample of users is not representative of Windows usage as a whole. For example, I doubt that many enterprises are reflected in their sample base, since they are very unlikely to use store apps at all, let alone store apps with ads from AdDuplex.</p><p><br></p><p>Within the subset of people that do use AdDuplex-supported apps, it is still interesting to see trends over time, but it’s quite wrong to extrapolate this to Windows version share as a whole.</p>

      • hrlngrv

        Premium Member
        31 January, 2022 - 9:33 pm

        <p>The big question for me is AdDuplex’s geographic reach. Are the 5,000-odd apps from which it collects usage data spread across dozens of different languages, or are 90% or more of those 5,000-odd apps English only? If predominantly English, it’s data may be collected from less than 25% of PC users.</p>

  • cnc123

    28 January, 2022 - 10:51 pm

    <p>"Supported PCs" is doing a lot of work here. Does this mean that 84% of PCs that could run Windows 11 aren’t?</p>

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