There are billions of Android phones and tablets out there, but only a vanishingly small number of them are running Google's latest Android release, known as Oreo. Google has released updated platform distribution numbers, which show that a mere 0.5 percent of Android devices are on Oreo(Opens in a new window), and the latest 8.1 build hasn't even hit the necessary 0.1 percent cutoff to be included. This sounds bad, but the news is actually better than it was last year.
As things currently stand, Android 7.0 and 7.1 (Nougat) have a combined share of 23.3 percent, but Marshmallow is still the biggest chunk of all Android devices with 29.7 percent market share. That version of Android was launched over two years ago, so many of these devices are no longer getting security updates. Lollipop, which came out the year before that, is also larger than Nougat with 26.3 percent of active devices.
The remainder of Android phones and tablets are running older versions of the OS like KitKat, and Gingerbread. Yes, there are still 0.4 percent of devices (less than Oreo!) running Gingerbread. That version of Android launched just over seven years ago on the Nexus S. This OS is so clunky and slow by today's standards, I can only assume it's running on modded tablets or smartphones in some far-flung corner of the world.
Android's sluggish update timeline is thanks to the way it's deployed on devices. Google makes the operating system and releases the open source code. Device makers take than, optimize for their hardware with the help of vendors like Qualcomm and MediaTek, and sell phones. It's the smartphone maker that's responsible for pushing updates, and sometimes there's not a compelling business reason for them to do so quickly or at all. If you purchase a cheap phone, there's little incentive for the maker to spend resources pushing more than a few small updates.
It's not all bad news, though. Nougat's rise last year was actually slower than Oreo this year. So, we should see better results as the big 2018 flagship phones start dropping in a few months. Going forward, all phones that launch with Oreo will have support for Project Treble. This is a modular version of the Android platform that separates the low-level vendor code like hardware drivers from the user-facing stuff. This change should make updates faster because OEMs don't need to wait for updated drivers from Qualcomm and others.
For the time being, Oreo users are in the extreme minority. Hopefully, that won't be the case for future updates.
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