Google officially launched Android 5.0 in mid-October with a trio of new devices: the Nexus 6 handset, Nexus 9 tablet and Nexus Player streaming box. But very few existing devices have so far received Lollipop, and many manufacturers have still not clearly detailed their plans for delivering the update to customers.
But Google and its hardware partners are finally beginning to make progress in getting the update out. The company"s latest figures show that Android 5.0 is now installed on 1.6% of Android devices - a considerable leap compared with last month, when the proportion of devices running Lollipop was below 0.1%.
However, the data also shows that the number of devices running Android 4.4 KitKat also grew very slightly - up to 39.7%, from 39.1% last month. Even so, that growth was much smaller than in the month before that, when the KitKat user base had increased from 33.9%.
But most other versions of the OS saw a decline in the latest figures through to February 2, losing overall share to the two newest releases. Jelly Bean (Android 4.1 to 4.3) remains the single largest block, though, with 44.5% of devices running these versions.
The Lollipop rollout has been complicated by various issues that emerged in the earliest public builds of the OS - a point that HTC made this week, when it admitted that it would miss its own target for updating the One M8 and M7 to Android 5.0.
Source: Google Developers