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 April 3, 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2.3.3 - 2.3.7 | Gingerbread | 10 | 1.0% | 0.9% | -0.1 |
| 4.0.3 - 4.0.4 | Ice Cream Sandwich | 15 | 1.0% | 0.9% | -0.1 |
| 4.1.x | Jelly Bean | 16 | 3.7% | 3.5% | -0.2 |
| 4.2.x | 17 | 5.4% | 5.1% | -0.3 | |
| 4.3 | 18 | 1.5% | 1.5% | - | |
| 4.4 | KitKat | 19 | 20.8% | 20.0% | -0.8 |
| 5.0 | Lollipop | 21 | 9.4% | 9.0% | -0.4 |
| 5.1 | 22 | 23.1% | 23.0% | -0.1 | |
| 6.0 | Marshmallow | 23 | 31.3% | 31.2% | -0.1 |
| 7.0 | Nougat | 24 | 2.4% | 4.5% | 2.1 |
| 7.1 | 25 | 0.4% | 0.4% | - |
Obviously, the only winner this month was Android 7.0 Nougat, which saw an 87.5% increase in usage to 4.5%, although this isn"t exactly a number to brag about when the OS was released almost eight months ago. But what seems to be even worse is that the latest version of the OS, 7.1 Nougat, remains stagnant at 0.4%, despite having been released almost five months ago.
Marshmallow showed its first loss, which should hopefully be an indication that it"s now the time for Nougat to grow, even though it"s a small loss of 0.1. Lollipop still combines for the highest share of a codename at 32%, beating out Marshmallow by a narrow margin.
Jelly Bean and KitKat continued their patterns of loses, so next month, you"ll likely see them fall below 10% and 20%, respectively. What"s more interesting is that both Gingerbread and Ice Cream Sandwich both lost 0.1 after remaining at 1.0% for months.
Since Nougat is finally beginning to gain some traction, that means one thing: Android O is right around the corner. Indeed, Google has already announced it and released a Developer Preview. You won"t see it on the usage breakdown until it"s on over 0.1% of Google Play devices, which will probably be later this year in the third quarter when it"s released.