Windows 10 October 2018 Update still struggling to convince people to upgrade

Windows 10 October 2018 Update
Image Credit: Microsoft

Fresh statistics suggest that the rollout of the Windows 10 October 2018 Update is gathering pace, and it has finally passed the 20% mark, although that still leaves it in a clear minority compared to the April 2018 Update.

The figures for February (or most of the month) from AdDuplex show that the October 2018 Update is installed on 21.2% of Windows 10 PCs worldwide. Although note that this is PCs which run the firm’s adverts (via Microsoft Store apps) which is where the statistics are drawn from (with over 100,000 computers analyzed).

That’s a sizeable jump from the previous stats for January, which indicated that the October 2018 Update was on 12.4% of machines. The month before that – December 2018 – the figure was 6.6%, so we can see that the numbers are roughly doubling with every month.

Still, the rollout of the October 2018 Update remains painfully slow, and the April 2018 Update is present on the vast majority (71.6%) of Windows 10 PCs out there, at least going by AdDuplex’s stats (which obviously present a fairly limited viewpoint on the different versions of Windows 10 installed on computers out there).

April showers, October drizzles

What we really have to remember here is that when AdDuplex charted the progress of the April 2018 Update, in just a month after release it had reached 50% of Windows 10 PCs. So that gives you some idea of just how badly Microsoft’s latest rollout has faltered.

There are numerous reasons why the October 2018 Update has been such a slow process, not the least of which are the many problems which plagued it post-launch, and the fact that Microsoft was forced to pause the rollout for over a month when some truly worrying bugs were found (including one that deleted user data).

Even when the rollout resumed after that, further issues were encountered, and Microsoft has been pretty cautious in pushing the update overall. Indeed, it was only a month ago that the software giant reopened the ‘phased rollout’ floodgates to automatically push the update to Windows 10 PCs.

We can presumably expect a big increase this coming month, certainly given that the next update – the Windows 10 April 2019 Update, as it will likely be imaginatively named – is now on the horizon. Although there is the possibility that some machines may simply end up skipping straight from the April 2018 Update to the April 2019 Update.

Via On MSFT

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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