After finally unveiling the much-talked about Android 4.4 KitKat a few days back, Google has revealed that the different versions of the last release of its mobile operating system, Jelly Bean, are now running on more than half of all Android devices. It's worth pointing out that the total sample excludes forked variants of Android (the ones on Amazon's Kindle Fire tablets) and variants in China that don't include Google services.
Sharing the
distribution data of different versions of Android, for the month of November, Google informed that the most recent version of Jelly Bean, Android 4.3 is now present on 2.3 percent devices, compared to the 1.5 percent share it registered, last month. Android 4.2.x is now on 12.5 percent devices (vis a vis 10.6 percent, last month), while Android 4.1.x is now on 37.3 percent devices (its share was 36.5 percent previously).
Android 4.0.x or Ice Cream Sandwich registered a share of 19.8 percent, a decline of 0.8 points.
Android 2.2 Froyo's device distribution share was 1.7 percent, a dip of 0.5 points while the share of Gingerbread (Android 2.3.x) was 26.3 percent, compared to 28.5 percent last month. While Gingerbread's share reduced by 2.2 points this month, it still has the second-largest share, making things difficult for developers who've been trying to put Android 4.0 as the threshold. This also implies that a major number of Android users don't get access to the latest version of some apps.
Beginning April, the data charts are now based on the data collected from each device when the user visits the Google Play store. Google says this is to make it more accurate and reflect the percentage of users who are actively engaged in the Android and Google Play ecosystem. Prior to this, data was collected when the device simply checked-in to Google servers.
Starting September, Google stopped including Android 1.6 Donut and Android 2.1 Éclair in the data as it is gathered from the new version of Google Play store app, which supports Android 2.2 and above.
A number of budget devices are still releasing with Android 2.3 and Android 4.0, with no clear update path, making things difficult for consumers and developers.
Google released Android 4.4 KitKat, the latest iteration of Android, last week, along with the Nexus 5, the company's new showcase smartphone that ships with the new OS.
Android 4.4 will soon be available on Nexus 4 smartphone, Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 tablets. In addition to that , Google also revealed that the new Android iteration will be rolled out to Google Play editions of Samsung Galaxy S4 and HTC One in the coming weeks. However, the two generation old
Galaxy Nexus will not receive the update.