It’s a new month and as expected we have the latest statistics from Google on the state of the Android platform as far as adoption of each flavour is concerned.
Android 5’s rise continues in October as its share jumped from 21% to 23.5% buoyed by increased update of version 5.1 which now accounts for 8% of all devices that accessed the Google Play Store in the 7 day period ending October 5th, 2015. Last time, Android 5.1’s share of the pie was just 5.1%. Most of the devices being updated to 5.1 were on the buggy 5.0 release and as a result 5.0’s share dipped slightly to stand at 15.6% down from 15.9% last month.
The gains made by Android Lollipop came at the expense of other versions. Android KitKat, which remains the most widely used flavour of Android, saw its share dip slightly from 39.2% to 38.9% in just a month. Android JellyBean also experienced a drop in the number of devices running as it accounted for 30.2% down from 31.8% at the start of September.
Android Froyo remains unmoved at a negligible 0.2% share of the pie while its successor, Android Gingerbread, saw its share dip to 3.8% from 4.1%. Android 4.0, codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich, wasn’t spared either as it entered the long road to oblivion with just 3.4% of devices running the 4-year-old operating system.
Google started rolling out the latest version of Android, Marshmallow, this week and it is expected to make an appearance next month. As device manufacturers release Marshmallow upgrade plans (Motorola, Sony and HTC) and those devices eventually make the jump to Android 6.0, it is Android Lollipop’s share of the pie that will be immediately threatened since most of the devices eligible for the upgrade are those running Android 5.0 and 5.1.
