Android 10 was launched in late 2019 by Google to succeed Android 9 Pie. This version also dropped including the desert name and letter in its name, at least externally. Internal teams at Google kept the desert name.
Android 10 brought system-wide dark mode, Focus mode(a compliment to Digital Wellbeing), new gesture navigation systems, boosted privacy, security and notifications (Grouped silent notifications)controls, better location permissions, Google Assistant “handles”, native screen recording, native desktop mode, QR codes to connect to Wi-Fi plus more features.
Last year, Google shared a distribution chart showing adoption numbers of its various OS versions and Android 10 showed less impressive numbers.
As of May last year, Android Pie had reached 10.4% – something Android 10 is yet to achieve. Android 10 has an 8.2% share against Android 9 Pie that takes the lion’s share at 31.3%.
Android 11 was launched in early September last year and began rolling out to older smartphones while newer smartphones were shipping with Google’s latest mobile OS straight out of the box.
The OS brought new privacy and security features including improved handling of app permissions for the camera, microphone, and location, scoped storage, and auto-reset permissions for apps you haven’t used in a while, Nearby Share, ability to pin apps in the share menu and scheduled dark mode, powerful media controls, seamless updates, Multitasking pane, improved autofill, suggested apps, biometric authentication, among a host of other useful features.
Android 12 launched last month and brought features like the Material You design language, wallpaper-based UX theming, an improved Privacy Dashboard, features like approximate location, App Hibernation, and more.
Well, we now know that Android 10(Q) adoption increased over the years to be king at this year’s distribution chart to take 26.5% while Android 11(R) is available on 24.2% of all devices.
This gives both of them a more than 50% share of the overall distribution.
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Android 12 is still young and was included in the data shared by Android Studio. These distribution numbers offer recommendations from Google to developers to examine which OS release they should be focussing on to get the most users when developing their apps.
The rest of the OS versions tag along with Android 9 Pie at 18.2%, Android 8 Oreo at 13.7%, Android 7 Noughtat at 6.3%, Android 6 Marshmallow at 5.1%, Android 5 Lollipop at 3.9% a, Android 4.4 Kitkat at 1.4% and Android 4 Jellybean at 0.6%.
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