this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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30% is still a lot
Its half of what Android has and its clearly not "most popular operating system in the world by any measure".
They said one of the most popular operating systems by any measure.
It beats out all the BSD flavours, RedoxOS, TempleOS, MacOS (by an order of magnitude, I might add), Haiku, AmigaOS, Minix, just to name the more known ones. If you discount servers, it's nearly 30x as popular as Linux. It's on track to having more users than Windows. It gets beaten only by Android, Windows, and potentially Linux because of all the data centers (honestly kinda hard to get a real number on how many Linux servers are out there, especially since a lot are also virtual machines, etc)
As far as operating systems go, iOS is in the top 0.5%, so definitely one of the most popular.
If there is a competition of 3 systems and you're on 3rd place, then yes, you're "one of". But you're still the last.
There are hundreds of operating systems, multiple are in the category of "actually used by tens of millions of people": Windows, MacOS, Linux, ChromeOS, Android, iOS, webOS, Tizen, etc are the first that come to mind. iOS gets 3rd place out of those (assuming you don't count billions of virtual machines running in data centers for Linux, in which case Linux also beats out Android). iOS will also beat out Windows soon enough because computers aren't really a thing for normies anymore, most people just get by on a smartphone.
If you only consider the 3 most popular operating systems in the world to be operating systems, then sure, iOS is in last place. But maybe broaden your horizons on operating systems and you'll realize that iOS is ridiculously popular in the grand scheme of things. One day it might even reach #1 as 3rd world countries catch up economically and start buying more expensive phones, but that's just speculation of course.
Your argument is like "Athlete X was in last place in the olympics, so they're nowhere near the top of their sport", ignoring the hundreds of thousands of other athletes who didn't make it to the olympics and never will.