Android Nougat’s adoption rate is just plain sad

Android 7.0 Nougat is on a steady rise now. The months immediately following its release were pretty sad, with the update being on so few devices that it didn’t show up in these distribution reports for weeks. It finally made its first significant dent back in February with a paltry 1.2%.

And now, in August — nearly a full year since its initial availability — it’s sitting at a whopping 13.5%. That’s still not what you want to see out of a major OS release for the most popular smartphone operating system in the world, but what are you going to do?

Well, we’ll tell you what Google’s going to do: they’re going to go as far as changing the Android framework to make it easier than ever for OEMs to deploy new updates to Android users. The company talked about this a bit at Google I/O, if you don’t remember.

This won’t change much for the current lot of you Android users, save for Pixel-owning faithful, as these improvements cannot be added to phones unless those phones come with Android 8.0 out of the box. That means we probably won’t be seeing even 50% adoption rates overnight as more and more folks hold onto their smartphones for longer periods of time.

But the future of Android will depend on an OS that can be rapidly innovated, updated, and distributed, and it needs to happen sooner rather than later. Fragmentation has been excused for close to a decade now, but we’re more than ready to start living on greener grass.