Android 11 R is leading the race with a 23.5% market share, according to the April 2023 Android distribution statistics sourced by 9to5Google. It has been years since Google stopped updating these numbers on the Android distribution dashboard, but the said data is now available via Android Studio.
The latest public release Android 13, which came out in August last year, has shown considerable improvement in the last few months. It has taken a big jump from a 5% market share in January 2023 to 12.1% in April 2023. It seems to have eaten the share of older versions, all of which have shown varying amounts of drops in their numbers.
Here is a comparison between the Android version distribution for the months of January and April 2023:
| Android Version | Jan 2023 (%) | April 2023 (%) |
|---|---|---|
| Android 13 T | 5.0 | 12.1 |
| Android 12 S | 18.9 | 16.5 |
| Android 11 R | 24.4 | 23.5 |
| Android 10 Q | 19.5 | 18.5 |
| Android 9 Pie | 13.2 | 12.3 |
| Android 8 Oreo | 9.5 | 6.7 |
| Android 7 Nougat | 3.7 | 3.3 |
| Android 6 Marshmallow | 2.8 | 2.5 |
| Android 5 Lollipop | 2.1 | 1.9 |
| Android 4 KitKat | 0.7 | 0.6 |
Third-party data provided by StatCounter paints a slightly different picture, where Android 12 has the highest share of 22.22% as of March 2023. Meanwhile, Android 13 is sitting in the third position with a market share of 17.65%.
For comparison, iPhones have delivered better performance when it comes to the latest software adoption. Apple"s iOS 16 update was running on 72% of iPhones after five months of its public release. It should be noted that the entire iPhone development, including both hardware and software, is tightly controlled by Apple which is not the case with Android. However, the latest numbers have shown up soon after Google started the rollout of Android 14 Beta 1.
Source: 9to5Google