The latest update to Google’s developer dashboard with new platform distribution numbers went live yesterday, April 1, as it does at the beginning of each month. While nothing major has changed, there are at least a few things worth pointing out here, like the fact that the number of active devices running KitKat has doubled (and then some) since last month. Back in March, only 2.5% of devices were running Android’s latest and greatest flavor to date. This month, that number has grown to 5.3%, and with the Samsung Galaxy S5 coming soon and the HTC One (M8) already here, this number will only continue to grow in the coming months.
The Jelly Bean variants (4.1.x, 4.2.x, 4.3) make up the largest piece of the pie with 61.4%, down just a hair from last month’s share of 62%. Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0.3 – 4.0.4) is also on the decline, with last month’s share at 15.2% and this month’s share at 14.3%. Honeycomb is virtually irrelevant. Google’s tablet-specific version of Android, which never seemed to take off the way the search engine giant intended it to, is still where it was last month: a whopping 0.1%.
Gingerbread (2.3.3 – 2.3.7) is slowly starting to fade away as well. This month, only 17.8% of active Android devices were running Gingerbread, as to where 19% was the magic number last month. FroYo (2.2 – 2.2.3) accounts for 1.1% of the share this month, down from last month’s 1.2%. Froyo was released all the way back on May 10th, 2010, folks. It’s pretty hard to believe that there are still devices running an OS this old, but that certainly appears to be the case.
Because this data is gathered from the new Google Play Store app, which supports Android 2.2 and above, devices running older versions are not included. However, in August, 2013, versions older than Android 2.2 accounted for about 1% of devices that checked in to Google servers (not those that actually visited Google Play Store).
With Google I/O not too far off, it won’t be long before we (presumably) have another version of Android to the list. We’ll update you again next month when the numbers are released, but until then we’d like to hear from you in the comment thread below. Which version of Android are you currently running on your device(s)? I’m running 4.4.2 on both my Galaxy Note 3 and Nexus 7, and aside from a few minor bugs, it’s my favorite iteration of Android to date.