Google has published its latest monthly breakdown of platform usage, showing the proportion of active devices running each version of the Android OS. The data is collected during a 7-day period that ended on March 6, and it only represents devices that have visited the Google Play Store during that period, so to be clear, it does not include AOSP devices.
| Version | Codename | API | Last month | This month | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2.33 - 2.3.7 | Gingerbread | 10 | 1.0% | 1.0% | - |
| 4.0.3 - 4.0.4 | Ice Cream Sandwich | 15 | 1.0% | 1.0% | - |
| 4.1.x | Jelly Bean | 16 | 4.0% | 3.7% | -0.3 |
| 4.2.x | 17 | 5.7% | 5.4% | -0.3 | |
| 4.3.x | 18 | 1.6% | 1.5% | -0.1 | |
| 4.4 | KitKat | 19 | 21.9% | 20.8% | -1.1 |
| 5.0 | Lollipop | 21 | 9.8% | 9.4% | -0.4 |
| 5.1 | 22 | 23.1% | 23.1% | - | |
| 6.0 | Marshmallow | 23 | 30.7% | 31.3% | 0.6 |
| 7.0 | Nougat | 24 | 0.9% | 2.4% | 1.5 |
| 7.1 | 25 | 0.3% | 0.4% | 0.1 |
Clearly, the big winner this month was Nougat, but while it"s on 133% more devices than it was a month ago, it"s still on only 2.8% of all Google Play Android devices, which is frankly terrible for an OS update that came out almost seven months ago. To make matters worse, only 0.4% of devices are on the latest version, which was released almost four months ago.
With the increase in Nougat"s share and Marshmallow"s jump to 31.3%, Android usage hits a major milestone, which is that more than a third of all devices running Google Play are on a version of the OS that"s less than 18 months old.
The rest of the list is continuing to slowly decline. Gingerbread and Ice Cream Sandwich remain flat at 1%, which isn"t all that surprising given how old those versions are. Basically, if they"re not gone by now, there"s no reason to believe that they"d disappear soon.
With 32.5% of Android devices, Lollipop is still the most popular codename, even after a 0.4% decline. KitKat took the biggest hit and is now down to 20.8%, and Jelly Bean now accounts for 10.6% of Google Play devices.