Google just made public Android 5.1.1, the latest version of Lollipop, last week. The update is meant to iron out a lot of the issues that have plagued Android 5 since it first appeared on devices last year. Despite Android 5 being a little over a month away from the day it was demoed at Google I/O 2014 as Android L, it has struggled to gain widespread adoption. Currently, as per statistics posted by Google on the Android developer dashboard, it has risen steadily from the 1% share of the pie it commanded at the start of the year to about 10%.
At 9.7%, Android 5 is not doing well. iOS 8 by comparison boasts of 81% adoption. Android 4.4 KitKat still remains king with 39.8% while Jelly Bean’s three point releases earn it a combined total of 39.2% of the marketshare. We still have ghosts like the four-year old Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and the aged Android 2.3 Gingerbread and Android 2.2 Froyo still making an appearance, albeit technical.
The launch of new devices running Android Lollipop straight out of the box and the continued update of older devices as Lollipop stabilizes is expected to boost these numbers going forward. Even then, we don’t expect Lollipop to account for anything more than 40% anytime soon. Probably it will be there before Google overhauls Android not from a cosmetic point of view like it did with Material Design but from the back-end with the Dart programming in place of Java as far as application support goes.
