Eleven months after its release, Marshmallow reaches 18.7% of Android devices

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 September 5, and once again, all versions of the OS declined in usage with the exception of the two newest releases (and 2.2 Froyo, which still clings on to life, at 0.1%).

Eleven months have now passed since Google originally released Android 6.0 Marshmallow. After a somewhat modest increase of just 1.9% last month - compared with 2.9%, 2.6% and 3.2% in the months before that - Marshmallow has now grown in usage by a much chunkier 3.5%, rising to 18.7% of active Android devices.

That puts Marshmallow ahead of Jelly Bean (versions 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3) - now collectively on 15.6% of devices - for the first time.

Version	Codename	API	Last month	This month	Change
2.2	Froyo	8	0.1%	0.1%	/
2.3.3 - 2.3.7	Gingerbread	10	1.7%	1.5%	-0.2%
4.0.3 - 4.0.4	Ice Cream Sandwich	15	1.6%	1.4%	-0.2%
4.1.x	Jelly Bean	16	6.0%	5.6%	-0.4%
4.2.x		17	8.3%	7.7%	-0.6%
4.3		18	2.4%	2.3%	-0.1%
4.4	KitKat	19	29.2%	27.7%	-1.5%
5.0	Lollipop	21	14.1%	13.1%	-1.0%
5.1	Lollipop	22	21.4%	21.9%	0.5%
6.0	Marshmallow	23	15.2%	18.7%	3.5%

But Android 4.4 KitKat remains the single most widely used version of the OS, despite its drop from 29.2% to 27.7%, making it the largest decline of any Android version this month too.

5.1 Lollipop is slowly narrowing the gap with KitKat, growing by 0.5% to 21.9%, but version 5.0 fell by 1.0%, leaving it in a distant fourth place behind Marshmallow. Combined, the two Lollipop versions are now 35% of devices, though - almost twice the percentage of Marshmallow.

Android 7.0 Nougat, which Google began rolling out last month, hasn't yet made its way to a statistically significant proportion of devices. Any versions of Android installed on less than 0.1% of devices are not included in Google's monthly figures.

Source: Google Developers