14 DAY TRIAL // Google has made available new data related to the distribution of the various flavors of its Android operating system on devices out there, showing that Android 4.4 KitKat is already grabbing share.
The info that Google has collected during the seven-day period ending on December 2 shows that KitKat is now loaded on 1.1 percent of all Android devices out there.
The performance is impressive, considering the fact that this platform version is currently loaded only on a small number of devices, and that it has been around only for about one month.
Said data also unveils that Jelly Bean has gained even more ground among the various Android versions, and that it is currently loaded on 54.5 percent of all Android devices out there.
However, this figure includes all flavors of Jelly Bean, starting with Android 4.1 and going up to Android 4.2.x and Android 4.3, data published on the Android Developers website unveils.
The Ice Cream Sandwich iteration of the mobile operating system, which includes Android 4.0.3 and 4.0.4 platform versions, is currently running on 18.6 percent of devices.
Furthermore, Google unveils that Honeycomb, the Android 3.2 variant that was released mainly for tablets, is loaded only on 0.1 percent of devices, which suggests that it might be removed from the distribution graphic soon.
Android 2.3.3 - 2.3.7 Gingerbread is now present on 24.1 percent of devices, while the older Android 2.2 Froyo OS release powers only 1.6 percent of them.
We should note that the data was gathered from the Google Play Store app, which is available only on Android 2.2 and newer devices, which means that older platform releases haven’t been taken into consideration.
“However, in August, 2013, versions older than Android 2.2 accounted for about 1% of devices that checked in to Google servers (not those that actually visited Google Play store),” Google explains.
Moving forth, we should see the latest versions of Android, such as Jelly Bean and KitKat, grabbing even more ground among other platform releases, though it might still take a lot of time until Android 2.x releases are deemed obsolete.