The explosive growth seen by Microsoft's Windows 11 operating system over the past few months is beginning to slow, new figures suggest.

The latest report from AdDuplex shows that Windows 11 user numbers are levelling out, perhaps suggesting Microsoft needs to up its game with some new updates or additions to the platform soon.

For the month of March 2022, Windows 11 took just 0.1% market share from other editions of Microsoft's software, accounting for 19.4% of the overall usage, with a further 0.6% using a Windows 11 Insider build.

Windows 11 upgrade

The numbers show that, despite Microsoft's push to get users to upgrade to Windows 11, its previous edition is still holding strong for many consumers.

Of the 80% using Windows 10, the larger proportion were found to be using the two most recent update families. Windows 10 N21U (21H2), released in November 2021, had 28.5% of the overall market, with its slightly older sibling, Windows 10 M21U (21H1), released in March 2021, taking 26.5% of the share.

The remaining 25% was made up of various older builds dating back to 2018, indicating that Microsoft does still have some work to do in order to get a large number of users upgraded to its latest editions.

AdDuplex takes its figures from 5,000 Windows Store apps, so may not be entirely representative of the true market share, but the figures do appear to corroborate recent findings from Microsoft itself.

The company recently shared that 1.4 billion devices are running both Windows 10 and Windows 11, although it didn't reveal specific numbers for either build. 

This has posed a problem for some business users however, as recent research found that as many as a third of work laptops or PCs don't meet the minimum requirements to run Windows 11, with the lack of TPM 2.0 the main culprit.

The report from Riverbed added 19.45% of devices will need a storage upgrade, 11% will need to be upgraded to TPM 2.0 and 8% will need to be upgraded with UEFI – with 12% of work PCs needing to be replaced entirely.

Via OnMSFT

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