Perhaps giving more hope of a defragmented future, Google‘s latest Android distribution chart reveals Android KitKat rising quite quickly in adoption. However, movement in all other versions are moving as slow as molasses.
Android 4.4 was off to a slow start, which was expected, but the past few months have been quite encouraging. In April, it managed to double its cut of the pie, coming at 5.3 percent versus March’s 2.5 percent. Though not as phenomenal as that, the numbers coming in from the 7-day period ending on May 1 shows a marked increase, with the latest Android version now at 8.5 percent. With updates still ongoing for some recent and not so recent devices, those numbers are bound to still rise considerably by the time we take our next survey.
On the other hand, other Android versions aren’t so quick to give up their hold of the market. Android 2.3 Gingerbread barely lost a full 2 percent, ending up with 16.2 percent. Android 4.0 is still holding on to its 13.4 percent share. Of course, the Jelly Bean family remains king of the hill with a total of 60.8 percent. Curiously, both Android 4.1 and Android 4.3 have decreased in number, while Android 4.2 seems to be increasing its territory by just a bit.
We are still quite far away from being free of fragmentation as far as OS versions are concerned, but at least the market has more or less coalesced on the more recent ones. Entry level, low-tier, budget smartphone running Android 4.4 are slowly starting to appear, which could give encouragement to manufacturers and white box distributors to start adopting the latest Android for their devices as well.
SOURCE: Google
