The numbers are in!
Android Marshmallow gained 3 percentage points over the last one month to see its market share of the Android pie grow to 13.3% up from 10.1% in June.
As expected, as more devices became available running Android 6.0 and others received updates on the same, older Android versions saw a decline in their market share. Popular budget smartphones like the Honor 5X, the Samsung Galaxy J7 and the Alcatel Idol 3 have all started receiving the Marshmallow update in the last one month further shoring up the numbers in Android 6.0’s favour.
Even then, 67% of Android device users with access to the Play Store during the study period, are still stuck on 2 and 3-year-old versions of Android, Lollipop and KitKat.
The numbers are still bad. Nothing to get excited about here
Android Jelly Bean, first introduced to the world 4 years ago, runs on 19% of all Android devices.
Google is expected to release a new version of Android, 7.0 Nougat, later in the year. Will Nougat finally be the one Android version that brings convergence and uniformity to a highly fragmented platform? I hope so but to be honest, I think not. It has taken 9 months for Marshmallow to move from 0 to just 13%. Lollipop which is in its second year of existence has only just hit the 35% mark.
There’s still a long way to go. With such a grim picture, Google’s plans to start making its own phones don’t sound so bad now.
Before I forget, the Fairphone team just got around to, FINALLY, releasing the KitKat update for the first generation Fairphone which was stuck on Jelly Bean. LOL.
