14 DAY TRIAL // New data provided by NetMarketShare reveals that Windows 10 keeps increasing its market share, with the month of April alone bringing an improvement of more than 1 percent.
Specifically, Windows 10 jumped from 44.10% in April to 45.73% last month, and this is a welcome increase as Microsoft’s latest operating system is getting closer to the 50% milestone.
More than 800 million devices currently run Windows 10, according to Microsoft’s own statistics. The company originally planned to bring the OS to 1 billion devices by the end of 2019, but it later admitted reaching this goal would take more than anticipated.
In the meantime, the software giant also struggles to kill off Windows 7, whose support is projected to be retired in January 2020.
In May 2019, Windows 7 was running on 35.44%, down from 36.43% the month before. Given the increase in market share recorded by Windows 10, there’s a chance that some of the users upgraded from Windows 10, albeit the wave of new PCs hitting the shelves worldwide also contributes to bigger adoption stats for the latest OS version.
Windows 8.1 keeps going down every month, so in May it dropped from 4.22% to 3.97%. The complete stats (April 2019 vs. May 2019) are available in the table below.
| Windows 10 | Windows 7 | macOS 10.14 | Windows 8.1 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| April 2019 | 44.10% | 36.43% | 5.23% | 4.22% |
| May 2019 | 45.73% ↗ | 35.44% ↘ | 5.34% ↗ | 3.97% ↘ |
This particular release introduces a series of changes that could make the upgrade to Windows 10 more compelling for Windows 7 users, including a new light theme and Windows Sandbox, a feature that allows the running of untrusted apps in a secured and closed environment.