Google posted its latest breakdown of platform usage this week, showing the proportion of active devices running each version of the Android OS. The data were collected during a seven-day period ending on December 7, and they show big gains for newer - but not the newest - Android releases.
The biggest growth over the last month was for Android 5.x Lollipop. By early November, Lollipop versions accounted for just over a quarter of active devices; this month, they add up to 29.5%, with 5.1 seeing the largest gains of any version, rising by 3.1% month-on-month.
Now over two years old, Android 4.4 KitKat is still the dominant version of the OS with 36.6%, but it also saw the greatest monthly decline, dropping by 1.2%. Android 4.x releases each dropped by smaller amounts, but the total decrease for all three Jelly Bean versions combined added up to 2.1%.
| Version | Codename | API | Last month | This month | Change |
| 2.2 | Froyo | 8 | 0.2% | 0.2% | / |
| 2.3.3 - 2.3.7 | Gingerbread | 10 | 3.8% | 3.4% | -0.4% |
| 4.0.3 - 4.0.4 | Ice Cream Sandwich | 15 | 3.3% | 2.9% | -0.4% |
| 4.1.x | Jelly Bean | 16 | 11.0% | 10.0% | -1.0% |
| 4.2.x | 17 | 13.9% | 13.0% | -0.9% | |
| 4.3 | 18 | 4.1% | 3.9% | -0.2% | |
| 4.4 | KitKat | 19 | 37.8% | 36.6% | -1.2% |
| 5.0 | Lollipop | 21 | 15.5% | 16.3% | +0.8% |
| 5.1 | 22 | 10.1% | 13.2% | +3.1% | |
| 6.0 | Marshmallow | 23 | 0.3% | 0.5% | +0.2% |
But two months after Google began rolling out Android 6.0 Marshmallow, there"s still very little movement on that front. While the very latest version, Android 6.0.1, has now begun rolling out, 6.0 has barely made its mark so far, crawling up to just 0.5% of active devices, leaving the remaining 99.5% on older versions of the OS.
Source: Android Developers via PocketNow