One Billion Android Devices Are Out of Date and Won't Get Further Updates

Android devices are getting replaced slower by their users, and now more than a billion Android phones and tablets are out of date and no longer have any kind of security support in place.

One of the problems with the Android market is that it’s really fragmented, meaning that there are a vast number of different devices, with their own hardware. On top of that, many of the mobile devices are also running old versions of Android that are no longer supported, and that shouldn’t be used.

In any case, it looks like there is a trend that follows every new release of Android. According to David Luu, a Microsoft engineer that put together a really interesting analysis, Android devices are getting older all the time and more out of date.

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This means that people don’t really throw away their old phones, despite the illusion that companies seem to sell a lot of new devices each year. The truth is the bulk of Android users will hold on to their phones and they don’t have any incentives to change them.

More than a billion

Compiling data about working and active Android devices is not easy, especially since Google is not exactly forthcoming. David gathered information regarding API versions, marketshare, and Google Play Store marketshare.

Since none of these sources provide any precise data, the result can be a little bit skewed, but not by much. We can consider that 1 billion is a conservative number, and it could be a little bit bigger, or a little bit smaller.

Of course, the most critical aspect is the security. The older the phone or tablet, the less likely is that it will receive any updates. And, with a billion devices out of date that are working right now and connected to Google Play store in the past seven days, the risk is immense.

Google is working to increase the support for new devices, and now they are up to two years, with Nexus 6P being the first one to benefit from this extension. If Google doesn’t do anything meaningful in the near future, these security problems is only going to become bigger until it can no longer be solved.