A new year, a new month and that must mean that Google has released the latest figures for Android device platform numbers. The statistics were as usual taken from a 7-Day sample leading up to the 4th of February.
The numbers haven’t shown any drastic changes over the last month. Android 4.4 has grown from being on 1.4% of devices in December to 1.8% of devices last month. Jelly Bean has both grown and shrunk depending on which version you look at, the Android 4.2 and 4.3 have both grown, with 4.2 rising from 15.4% to 16.3% and 4.3 rising from 7.8% in December to 8.9% last month, while Android 4.1 has seen a slight drop from being on 35.9% of devices in December to 35.5% of devices last month.
The rest of the lower versions of Android have mostly seen declines in usage, Ice Cream Sandwich dropped from 16.9% to 16.1%, former Android version champion Gingerbread dropped from 21.2% to an even 1/5th of devices coming in at 20%. Honeycomb and FroYo remained static at 0.1% and 1.3% respectively.
With more devices being announced shortly (Galaxy S5 possibly this month) there may be a big injection of devices on Android 4.4 quite soon. Meanwhile we await next months statistics with anticipation.
At least half the phones we stock at work are still running 2.3
Very few of the PrePaid handsets run anything higher, even my unlocked handsets half of that range is 2.3.
It’s great having affordable entry level phones, but I could never understand why Manufacturers continue to ship phones with GB when most of them are more than capable of running a newer OS.
Come to think of it, we don’t stock any KK devices and only 3? are running JB. The other few are on ICS.
What phones are still 2.3?
I thought even the little Samsung cheapies were 4.x now.
(EDIT: ohhh. I googled the Galaxy Y Duos. Hmmm… 2.3)
I was under the same impression. However I currently have in stock.
Alcatel Onetouch Pixi
Huawei Ascend G300+
Huawei Ascend Y210
Samsung Galaxy Ace+
Samsung Galaxy Y
Samsung Galaxy Y Duos
Samsung Galaxy Mini2
Those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head, there is another Alcatel one from memory.
This is something which Google could, and should, fix.
They could quite easily make it mandatory that new released devices must have a current release of Android to be permitted to use gapps.
I would have to agree with this. Many of the cheap Android phones are on 2.3. The update for Kit-Kat is slow because most of the phone companies haven’t released it yet, and then we have to wait on phone carriers. This is where Apple have the upper hand.
4.1 should be the minimum now.