Android Marshmallow has seen its adoption crawl past the 10 percent mark for the first time even after eight months since its launch, reveals Android’s latest distribution data. It’s on 10.1 percent of devices right now, which again makes for almost a double jump over the corresponding figures for April.
The recent bump in Marshmallow figures is attributed to the new smartphone launches in recent times all of which come with the latest Android pre-installed.
However, another revelation which again shouldn’t be to the liking of Google is that Lollipop and KitKat continue to hold on to the second and third slots with 35.4 and 31.6 percent of devices respectively. Lollipop has seen its share drop marginally by just 0.2 percent (from 35.6 percent) but is still running on most Android devices. For KitKat, the drop is slightly larger at 0.9 percent – from 32.5 percent – and is the third most used version of Android. Jelly Bean continues to run on 18.9 percent of devices, down from 20.1 percent.
After that, all the previous Android versions continue to maintain a lingering presence. Ice Cream Sandwich user base dropped from 2.0 to 1.9 percent while Gingerbread shrank to 2.0 percent from 2.2 percent. Surprisingly, Android Froyo launched around mid-2010 is still running on 0.1 percent devices. However, this could be the last time we see Froyo as any version with a user base less than 0.1 percent automatically gets excluded from the chart.
The above data also reveal the Android fragmentation issues that Google has grappled to deal with in the past but without much success. Much of it can be attributed to the lack of enough support from the device manufacturers towards rolling out the latest Android updates.
Compare the above figures with those for iOS, where its most recent version, iOS 9 runs on 84 percent iPhone. That makes just 16 percent (11 percent for iOS 8 and just 5 percent running earlier versions) iPhone running older iOS versions.
Further, with most of Google’s OEM operating on thin margins as they sell their device at the minimum possible price point, thy are left with a very little resource to spare towards making available the latest Android version to their older devices. Google is aiming to tackle the issue by shaming the companies that fail to provide the most recent updates though it remains to be seen if the ploy pays off.
