14 DAY TRIAL // Good news for Android fans and enthusiasts, as Google has just made public the adoption rates for its mobile platform for April and judging by the numbers, it looks like things are improving for the search giant.
Those who follow our monthly reports on Google’s Android platform stats have probably noticed that there’s an important improvement regarding the KitKat adoption on the smartphone market.
According to Google, Android 4.4.x KitKat is now running on 5.3% of devices that accessed the Google Play Store in the last seven days.
If these numbers are accurate, it means that KitKat has almost doubled its adoption rate and if things continue this way, it might reach 15% in the next few months.
Unfortunately, there still are devices on the market that run on Android 2.2 Froyo, but at least these are in low numbers now that OEMs are bringing prices for smartphones to really affordable tiers.
Google has just confirmed that only 1.1% of devices that visited Google Play store in the last week are powered by Android 2.2 Froyo.
However, another version of Android that’s pretty old but still sees a high distribution among users is Android 2.3.x Gingerbread. Google has announced that around 17.8% of devices that have accessed Google Play Store still run a version of Android Gingerbread.
The adoption rates announced by Google reveal that the highest number of devices that visited Google Play Store in the last seven days is powered by Android Jelly Bean operating system. No less than 61.4% of the total number of devices registered by Google in the last week were running Android 4.1.x, 4.2.x or 4.3 OS.
The numbers provided by Google for April are only 0.6% lower than the March adoption rate where Android Jelly Bean was confirmed with 62%. While this is not a consistent drop, at least it’s something encouraging for Google.
The same applies to Android 4.0.x Ice Cream Sandwich adoption rate which dropped from last month’s15.2% to April’s 14.3%. Still, it looks like Android 2.x (which includes Froyo and Gingerbread) had the biggest drop from 20.2% to 18.9%.
Keep in mind that the data gathered from the Google Play Store does not include devices powered by Android 2.1 Éclair, which is not supported by the new Play Store application.
However, Google has confirmed that devices running versions older than Android 2.2 accounted for only 1% of devices back in August 2013, which means that the number should be lower now.