Newsletter
Oreo has jumped up slightly to 0.5 percent for December compared to the 0.3 percent that it was at last month, which may not seem like a huge increase and it’s not in the scheme of percentages, but when you consider the amount of people that are likely included in that additional 0.2% this is still a large amount of users. Oreo wasn’t the only version of Android to jump up for this month, though, as Nougat saw an increase as well for both Android 7.0 and Android 7.1, with Android 7.0 jumping up to 19.3 percent from 17.6 percent last month, while Android 7.1 jumped up to 4 percent from three percent.
While both Android Oreo and Android Nougat have increased, versions of Android like Marshmallow have decreased. According to Google’s latest distribution numbers show that Marshmallow dropped down to 29.7 percent from 30.9 percent back in November. Android Lollipop 5.0 and 5.1 make up 6.1 percent and 20.2 percent respectively. Those numbers are down from 6.4 percent and 20.8 percent. KitKat also saw a decrease from 13.8 percent in November to 13.4 percent this month, while Jelly Bean and Gingerbread dropped just a little bit with Ice Cream Sandwich staying the same at 0.5 percent.
While Oreo should be the main focus here, the issue is that Oreo was just released this Fall so there aren’t many devices that have been updated to it yet or many OEMs who have applied that update to their devices in testing before pushing out to users, and it’s going to stay that way for quite some time until enough devices have been released that either come with Oreo out of the box or get an update soon after. As it stands right now Marshmallow is still the most widely adopted version of Android taking up an entire 29.7 percent of the Android distribution, and this is after two more versions of Android have been released. Taking this into consideration, it’s possible that Oreo won’t see that adoption until there are two more versions of Android released in the same way. As noted by Google the data that it collected about the distribution numbers spans a 7-day period that ended today, December 11th, which means the data collection on which versions of Android were being used by which percentage of users started on December 4th.
