Windows 11 overtakes Windows 10 in users, just in time

Have you heard? Windows 10 will stop getting updates in October as it finally goes out of service… except it won’t, because Microsoft relented and decided to give everyone an extra year of coverage. Maybe the company got spooked, because Windows 10 still had more users than Windows 11. According to one source, Windows 11 has finally edged past its predecessor, almost at the last second.

Statcounter reports that as of the beginning of July, desktop and laptop users on Windows 11 have finally overtaken the number of users on Windows 10, hitting 52 percent of Windows’ total installations. That’s up significantly from June at a hair under 48 percent. It’s essentially swapped places with Windows 10, which fell from 53.2 percent to 44.6 in the same month. Windows 7 (not 8) is still clinging to life with 2.35 percent of the market.

Statcounter

Windows is still the king of the desktop (which includes most laptops) sitting at 70 percent of the market. But expanding the view to all devices that access the internet with a user interface, crucially including phones and tablets, Android makes up 47.7 percent of the market. Windows gets just 24.7 percent of that total, with iOS/iPadOS coming in third at 16.9 percent.

Microsoft is desperate to get more users onto Windows 11, not quite four years after the operating system’s retail debut, and ten years after the release of Windows 10. It’s been begging, pleading, and almost bullying users to upgrade, or (preferably, of course) just buy a new machine.

But with various issues affecting the initial rollout, not to mention a bunch of annoying advertising baked in and a reluctance to engage with new Copilot AI tools and controversial features like Windows Recall, it’s not surprising that such a large number of users are sticking with the comfortable Windows 10.

The company had let the usual end-of-life setup serve as both a carrot and a stick. And while Windows 10 isn’t more notably long-lived than any other version of Windows, the landscape in 2025 is not what it used to be.

Regular consumers are more reliant upon smartphones and tablets for their connection to the digital world, none of which run a Microsoft operating system. Gamers are slowly exploring other options like the Steam Deck (or just looking at consoles as prices for PC graphics hardware skyrockets), and corporations are, as ever, slow to invest in brand new PCs when the old ones are still doing fine.

Just last month, Microsoft gave an extension to official support for Windows 10 going to October 2026, though you’ll have to jump through a hoop or two to get it.

Between the shifting landscape of the internet and Windows 11’s less-than-glorious rise, Windows 10 has hung around a lot longer than Microsoft hoped it would, despite once positioning it as a forever OS. The shift towards the current operating system will surely be a welcome one, but it’s coming very late indeed… and I wouldn’t be surprised to see Windows 10 cling to life for a long, long time, with or without the blessing of its creators.