The latest Platform Versions numbers show the same old story.
As of the start of this month, Android Nougat represents just 0.3% of active Android devices, following a common trend we see each time a new version is released. Android 7.0 Nougat has been out in the wild for Nexus owners for a couple of months now, but these numbers remind us all that Nexuses are not only a tiny fraction of phones sold in 2016 … they’re an even tinier fraction of active Android phones in the world. At the same time phones like the LG V20 haven’t had enough time to influence these numbers.
You’ll also notice that in the chart above Android 7.1 hasn’t even been broken out into its own category, which is due to the fact that it has less than 0.1% of the Android market — Pixel phones have only been on sale for a couple of weeks at this point.
One-fourth of active Android devices are running Android 4.4 KitKat.
Android 6.0 Marshmallow, which represents the largest chunk of mid- to high-end phones sold in the past two years, is at a respectable but still annoyingly low 24% of the Android market. The combination of Android 5.0 and 5.1 Lollipop come out to 34.1%, while Android 4.4 KitKat is still powering over one-fourth of active Androids. Thankfully things drop off sharply after that, with super-old Jelly Bean devices at 13.7%.
Those legacy KitKat devices are likely to hold on a bit longer as they won’t be updated past Android 4.4 at this point in their lives yet are likely living on as super budget phones that aren’t going to be replaced as quickly. From this point of view the Lollipop phones and tablets are the most concerning, as they’re likely more modern hardware that often could take a jump to Marshmallow, but likely won’t as they land outside of many manufacturers’ update windows.
With updates to Nougat starting to be tested and arriving for some modern Android phones at the end of the year we could be in for a notable jump in these numbers by January or February 2017, but the situation will still seem rather depressing when you consider the hundreds of millions of devices that will never see the latest software.
