One last look at Jelly Bean’s dominance before KITKAT arrives
Google has updated the world on Android distribution numbers for the two-week period ending November 1st (which, if you didn’t already know, was the day immediately following the announcement of Android 4.4 KITKAT and the Nexus 5). So how do the numbers stack up before the first taste of chocolate begins to trickle onto the scene?
Jelly Bean is still dominating the charts with a commanding lead over all the rest. It accounts for 52.1% of all Android devices that checked into the Google Play Store over the past two weeks. Of course, that statistic can be a tad misleading — a vast majority of those check-ins were on Android 4.1.x (37.3%), while 4.2.x (12.5%) and 4.3 (2.3%) lagged behind.
While the differences between those three revisions of Jelly Bean aren’t huge, it’s still alarming that only 2.3% of people were on the absolute latest version. That said, it is still an improvement over the 1.5% it had the last time Google updated us on these stats. The slight bump can be credited to companies like HTC and Samsung getting their flagship handsets upgraded to Android 4.3 starting in the past few weeks, and by launching their latest smartphones with the OS.
Moving on, we are a bit saddened to see that Gingerbread and Froyo still take up a combined 28% of the pie. We’re not sure which handsets are still keeping those versions’ heads above water, but it’s no less frustrating that it’s taking this long for legacy versions to die. We aren’t quite as saddened about the fact that Ice Cream Sandwich still has 19.8%, but old is old.
We should see KITKAT represented on this chart by the time the next update comes around, but history tells us we should expect adoption rates to be quite slow to start. Have you gotten upgraded to Android 4.3 or higher yet?