With the launch of Android’s yet-to-be-named version ‘N’ closing in, the previous major release, version 6.0 Marshmallow has finally hit a tenth of all users. Combined, all the versions of Android Marshmallow including 6.0.1 take up 10.1 percent of the market.
Worryingly, adoption has been slow and limited, rising precariously from last month when it had 7.5 percent share of the market and two months back, when it held just 4.6 percent of the market.
The list is still led by 5.0 and 5.1 Lollipop, which combined take more than thrice Marshmallow’s share, or 35.4 percent. Further back, KitKat, the now medieval-looking OS version made its way to 31.6 percent of the market, which would raise suspicions as to whether both the operating systems would turn out to be the Gingerbread of the post-Ice Cream Sandwich era.
Jelly Bean and its four-year old versions are still going strong, running on 18.9 percent of all Androids out there, while the previous major releases, Ice Cream Sandwich, Gingerbread and Froyo all ran on 2 percent or less devices. The last one could be the latest to disappear from the table showed on the Android developer website in the future, which doesn’t reflect any OS versions less than 0.1 percent.
Once again, comparisons with Apple will be inevitable. Compared to Marshmallow, Apple’s latest major release iOS 9 is already up and running on as much as 85 percent of all iOS phones and tablets out there. Apple’s closely-knitted ecosystem means phones as old as the iPhone 4S, as well as the iPad 2 are still receiving updates to day.
With the next OS version highly visible in the horizon, Google’s hopes of getting as many phones covered under the latest software’s umbrella are looking increasingly hopeless.
