Windows 10 May 2020 Update hasn’t proved popular – and you may as well skip it now anyway

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Going by new figures from AdDuplex

(Image credit: Microsoft)

Windows 10 May 2020 Update isn’t doing so well compared to its namesake update from 2019, going by the latest market share stats from AdDuplex.

The figures for September show that the May 2020 Update is now on a third of Windows 10 PCs, or 33.7% to be precise, which is up from 24.1% in August. So that makes for a 9.6 percentage point gain, which sounds robust enough, right?

And true, it’s not bad news by any means on the face of it, but when you consider how the May 2019 Update from last year fared, that progress looks a fair bit shakier. At this point at the end of September 2019, the May 2019 Update was on 45.5% of PCs according to AdDuplex, so that’s a long way ahead of 33.7%.

Granted, the May 2020 Update hasn’t been out for quite as long as its predecessor was at this point – but the difference is only three weeks, which given the rate at which adoption is currently increasing, doesn’t nearly account for the shortfall.

Imminent update

Furthermore, when you consider that the October 2020 Update is imminent, and should be here in a few weeks, the May 2020 Update now has very little time to carve out any further gains.

It will certainly surpass the current top dog version which is the November 2019 Update – that’s only 0.8% ahead right now, in fact, so just has the slimmest of leads – but it won’t get anywhere near the May 2019 Update which reached 56.6% adoption in October last year.

At this point, many folks will probably be looking at skipping straight to the October 2020 Update anyway, seeing as release is so close now, and it’s essentially the same upgrade, save for a few extra whistles and bells (like a new look for the Start menu).

Naturally, we should remember that this is just one set of statistics on Windows 10, so far from represents the whole picture of different versions of the desktop OS – but it’s an interesting snapshot nonetheless. AdDuplex gets its stats on Windows 10 users from Microsoft Store apps which display the company’s adverts.

Darren Allan

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).