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# The iPhone Air seems extremely niche in general, but my users love it
- URL: https://birchtree.me/blog/the-iphone-air-seems-extremely-niche-in-general-but-my-users-love-it/
- Published: 2026-09-11T21:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-11T20:59:59.000Z
- Author: Matt Birchler
- Tags: Links

[David Smith shared some numbers on how many people are using WidgetSmith](https://mastodon.social/@%5FDavidsmith/117253170115740653?ref=birchtree.me), his insanely popular, and therefore pretty representative of the overall market, app. He found the iPhone 17 line in general grew quicker than previous lines, but…

> With the exception of the Air really struggling to find market share. For comparison the 16 Plus ended its first year at around 1.4% (vs the Air's 0.3%).

This is particularly interesting to me because I recently pulled some metrics on what iPhones my users were using, and this is what I got:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/31/25312b2a-2d5b-4d01-ba92-e6755efc202c/content/images/2026/09/Pasted-image-20260911152510.png)

And here's a breakdown of just the iPhone 17 generation:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/31/25312b2a-2d5b-4d01-ba92-e6755efc202c/content/images/2026/09/Pasted-image-20260911152603.png)

This works out to about 6% of my iPhone users using the iPhone Air, or about 20x more proportionally than David's more mainstream app. Honestly, the numbers are pretty striking here, with David showing a pretty even split between the iPhone 17, 17 Pro, and 17 Pro Max, slightly decreasing in that order. Meanwhile, almost half of my users are on the Pro Max, another quarter are on the Pro, and the 17 is neck and neck with the Air. Clearly, my customers lean more enthusiast and are higher end buyers on average.

Although I will say one thing that caught my eye with my bar chart is that across every generation, the vast majority of my customers have Pro devices, except for the iPhone 12 and 13 generations. I don't have a pretty visualization for this, but those are actually primarily iPhone mini holdouts who are sticking with those tiny phones. Shout out. 🫡

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We're a little over a month away from the iPhone Duo coming out, and it will surely get quite a bit of attention when it does, but I expect there will be a similarly vast difference between David and my charts a year from now. I suspect he will have a sliver of his users on the Duo, maybe more than the Air, but probably not that much more. And I would not be surprised if 15 to 20% of my users actually adopt it by this time next year.