It’s April people. Like for real, and we just hit 5 percent on the ratio scale of Android distribution. Wait, it’s actually 4.9 percent.
Last month (March), we were at 2.8 percent, which to be honest is a good lead forward. However, seeing that Lollipop 5.0 and 5.1 combine to have the largest share of the pie at 32 percent, is quite worrying.
The rest of distribution looks either to be stagnant or to have reduced by some points. For the first time, Android Marshmallow has had a reduction in its distribution share, which signifies that manufacturers have stopped focusing on Marshmallow and are now releasing phones with Nougat or updating current devices to Nougat (but Infinix didn’t get that memo).
I am not sure what plans Google has to fix the problem of fragmentation Android, seeing that the company already started working on Android O.
Here’s a chart of the complete distribution numbers from Google:
| Android Version | Codename | API | Distribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2.3.3-2.3.7 | Gingerbread | 10 | 0.9% |
| 4.0.3-4.0.4 | Ice Cream Sandwich | 15 | 0.9% |
| 4.1.x | Jelly Bean | 16 | 3.5% |
| 4.2.x | " | 17 | 5.1% |
| 4.3 | " | 18 | 1.5% |
| 4.4 | KitKat | 19 | 20.0% |
| 5.0 | Lollipop | 21 | 9.0% |
| 5.1 | " | 22 | 23.0% |
| 6.0 | Marshmallow | 23 | 31.2% |
| 7.0 | Nougat | 24 | 4.5% |
| 7.1 | " | 25 | 0.4% |
*The data above is from Google. It was collected during a seven-day period ending on April 3, 2017. Any versions with less than 0.1 percent distribution are not shown.
