SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 15, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — In a unitQ analysis of more than 647,000 app store reviews across 5,043 iOS
apps, our proprietary AI detected a 2.8% increase in quality issues — friction — reported by users in the three weeks following the iOS 26 release (Sep 15–Oct 6). That’s a modest uptick compared with the dramatic spikes seen after iOS 16 and iOS 17, when user-reported quality issues jumped by double digits. Both iOS 18 and now iOS 26 have shown far more stability, evidence that developers are increasingly using real-time customer feedback to anticipate and address OS-level disruptions before users feel the impact.
The dataset
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Source: App Store reviews parsed and categorized by unitQ’s proprietary AI
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Scope: 5,043 unique apps; 647,705 pieces of user feedback
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Window: Pre-release (Aug 25–Sep 14) vs post-release (Sep 15–Oct 6)
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Findings:
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Quality issues: 110,177 → 113,246 (+2.8%)
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Feature requests: 2,345 → 2,105 (↓ to 1.8% of total)
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Overall feedback volume: +2.5%
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In raw terms, users reported slightly more friction after upgrading to iOS 26, but nowhere near the volatility of earlier updates like iOS 16 (+42%) and iOS 17 (+29%). The stability observed in iOS 18 (+3%) and now iOS 26 reflects how customer feedback-driven teams are catching and fixing regressions earlier in the rollout cycle. (*Apple jumped its OS version numbering from iOS 18 to iOS 26 this year.)
What users noticed most
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Crashes/force closes: +21.7%
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Slow performance: +23.4%
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Freezing: +33.1%
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Device not compatible: +28.9%
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Notifications not received: +24.7%
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Password not accepted: +41.8%
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Profile photo upload failures: +64.2%
Even as overall disruption was limited, these recurring stability issues show where OS-level changes continue to challenge developers. Minor regressions in login flows, notification delivery and media handling can quickly translate into thousands of frustrated users — and thousands of data points for AI to detect.
