Nearly a Quarter of All Android Devices Now Run on Android Marshmallow

New kid on the block Android Nougat only accounts for just 0.3%

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A year since its rollout, Android 6.0 aka Marshmallow now runs on nearly a quarter of all Android devices.

According to the latest monthly data from Google, 24% of all Android devices it recently captured when they accessed the Play Store run on Android Marshmallow, a far cry from the privileged few that are lucky to be rocking the latest version of Android, Nougat.

Quite notably, the new Android 7.1 which runs only on Google’s new Pixel smartphones, does not make the cut in this month’s figures as its user base is quite negligible.

2-year-old Android Lollipop is still the most dominant version of Android with over a third of the pie at 34% while KitKat’s dominance slumped to just a quarter.

[Android] VersionCodenameAPIDistribution
2.2Froyo80.1%
2.3.3-2.3.7Gingerbread101.3%
4.0.3-4.0.4Ice Cream Sandwich151.3%
4.1.xJelly Bean164.9%
4.2.x"176.8%
4.3"182.0%
4.4KitKat1925.2%
5.0Lollipop2111.3%
5.1"2222.8%
6.0Marshmallow2324.0%
7.0Nougat240.3%

With newer devices from now onwards launching with Android 7, Nougat’s fortunes are bound to change gradually over the next several months. In fact, if devices like the new Android One smartphone from General Mobile show up in good numbers, the tilt in Nougat’s favour may even be greater than we can foresee. But that’s a lot of ifs. Android device makers are notoriously slow when it comes to updating devices so many who have just received an upgrade to Marshmallow may be in for a long wait or never get the update at all.

5 COMMENTS

  1. Still, Android is as fragmented as it has always been (well, that’s not exactly true; the very first droids must not have been as fragmented due to one or two Android versions). The Pixel phone is the last hope (in my opinion) to deal with these manenos. It must set the tone and bar, it must be the standard with which all other droids of the future must measure.

    To do this, the Google phone must be made available globally as soon as possible. Also, I don’t think it would hurt the “premium phone” agenda if a similar-sized but cheaper (plastic?) version existed. Many premium Nokias of the past employed plastic to great aesthetic success. Google and HTC are clever, they can find a way for plastic to work. They just need to consider it. Again, my opinion.

    But Google seems to be hard at work on this fragmentation issue..
    http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/11/android-extensions-could-be-googles-plan-to-make-android-updates-suck-less/

    • They are already doing a fine job with Google Play Services which ensures the very sensitive updates to the gateway to Google’s app and content ecosystem are available to all on time but however much they try, as long as the system is still inclined towards favouring device makers and letting them have their way so that they can stick by Android, these efforts are all in vain.
      Knowing Google, an affordable Pixel is something we all want and wish for but it’ll probably never be real. I guess this is a problem of being a company based in a first world country and that thinks about products from the top going down. If you ask me, a cheaper Pixel would’ve been top priority if what Google was after was entirely dictating market direction but we’ve all seen how that went so well with Android One so… Microsoft, too, started out this way with over a year of releasing Lumias to markets that never mattered to the Nokia brand that much before and ignoring the masses that bought Nokia mobiles even before America tried to embrace them. Good as it may be, at the price it sells (never mind the market restrictions as well), the Pixel is just a trophy phone for Google, for now. Its influence is unlikely to be felt beyond the upper echelons of the geek community and the few who can afford similarly-priced devices. Indirectly, though, this will spur some serious stuff from Android OEMs. The only problem is that Google has no hand in this influence and from what I have seen recently, none of those guys is going to cede more control over how they handle the software on their devices to Google (Huawei, for instance, has invested heavily in altering Android) which takes us back to where we started: fragmentation all round. This is both tiring and disappointing.

  2. […] When it comes to releasing timely software updates to their devices, right from the monthly security patches to major bumps like newer versions of Android, there is no Android OEM you can count on to deliver on time. Forget what they all say when a new version of Android drops and some of them promise heaven in 90 or so days. It just never happens and the statistics speak for themselves. […]

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