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 was collected during a seven-day period ending on July 11, and shows declines for every version of the OS except for the two newest releases (and 2.2 Froyo, which stubbornly remains at 0.1% for another month).
Nine months after its original release, Android 6.0 Marshmallow (which includes version 6.0.1) is now installed on 13.3% of active Android devices.
That"s an increase of 3.2% compared with a month ago, when it had risen by 2.6%. That makes this the biggest single month"s gain for Marshmallow since its rollout began (the largest previous increase, of 2.9%, was two months ago).
Version | Codename | API | Last month | This month | Change |
2.2 | Froyo | 8 | 0.1% | 0.1% | / |
2.3.3 - 2.3.7 | Gingerbread | 10 | 2.0% | 1.9% | -0.1% |
4.0.3 - 4.0.4 | Ice Cream Sandwich | 15 | 1.9% | 1.7% | -0.2% |
4.1.x | Jelly Bean | 16 | 6.8% | 6.4% | -0.4% |
4.2.x | 17 | 9.4% | 8.8% | -0.6% | |
4.3 | 18 | 2.7% | 2.6% | -0.1% | |
4.4 | KitKat | 19 | 31.6% | 30.1% | -1.5% |
5.0 | Lollipop | 21 | 15.4% | 14.3% | -1.1% |
5.1 | 22 | 20.0% | 20.8% | 0.8% | |
6.0 | Marshmallow | 23 | 10.1% | 13.3% | 3.2% |
Android 5.1 Lollipop (including 5.1.1) was the only other version to increase its share of the platform this month, rising by 0.8%, and is now installed on almost 21% of devices. Combined with version 5.0, Lollipop"s total share of 35.1% now far exceeds that of 4.4 KitKat, which shrank by 1.5% to 30.1% over the last month.
But despite Marshmallow"s recent gains, Google has little to be proud of here. 13.3% is hardly an impressive figure after nine months of availability, especially when you consider that 86.7% of active Android devices - hundreds of millions in total - are still in active use but remain stuck on versions of the OS that are, in some cases, several years old.
Meanwhile, Google is already preparing to release its next major update - Android 7.0 Nougat - later this summer.
Source: Android Developers