Google has announced its monthly Android distribution numbers for February and the figures show some incremental shifts toward the latest operating systems over the past month. For starters, adoption of Android 8.1 Oreo has increased by 0.1-percent, while Android 8.0 Oreo has increased in usage by 0.3-percent. That brings a total increase of 0.4-percent for Android Oreo, with a total of 1.1-percent of all Android devices now running the latest iterations of the Android mobile OS. That’s not entirely unexpected as it isn’t atypical for very few of the latest devices to switch over to the latest version of the OS even this late after it launches and version 8.1, in particular, only just launched a couple of months ago. Meanwhile, the year has only just started and there will certainly be plenty of new devices running that version as they are announced.
Aside from Oreo, distribution of the previous iteration, Android 7.0 and 7.1 Nougat, continues to grow and is up from 21.1-percent to 28.5-percent saturation. That also means it has bypassed Marshmallow as the most widely used Android OS version. That is, at least in part, due to the continued widespread installation of Nougat for new device shipments. Marshmallow fell from 28.6-percent to 28.1-percent. The rest of the gains for Oreo and Nougat came from decreases in the adoption of other variations of Android. Lollipop – Android 5.0 and 5.1, respectively – fell by 0.5-percent to land at 24.6-percent from last month’s numbers. Android 4.4 KitKat is also down to 12-percent from its previous 12.8-percent. Collectively, Jellybean iterations of the world’s most popular mobile OS fell to five percent, while Ice Cream Sandwich fell 0.01-percent to just 0.4-percent. Gingerbread is currently the oldest version of the operating system still under support by Google and also fell by 0.1-percent to 0.3-percent.
The numbers show that while Oreo is beginning to pick up steam, it likely won’t become the leading Android OS version for quite some time still. Even though Google I/O 2018 is set to start at the beginning of May and a possible reveal of yet another new version of Android expected, the figures aren’t overly surprising. Android devices historically tend to remain with tried and tested versions of Android until all or most of the kinks have been worked out and the next variant, Android P, will probably be around for a while before Android 8.0 really gains a foothold. With that said, device manufacturers have begun to announce new devices and MWC 2018 is also just around the corner. So it is possible that Oreo will get a significant boost over the coming months. As always, these figures are collected in the seven days leading up to their compilation and release.
