14 DAY TRIAL // Google has just released the distribution numbers for the first month of summer, revealing some minor changes in the share of Android versions on the market. Android Nougat is now installed on 9.5% of devices on the market.
The latest Android version saw a gain of 2.4%, increasing from 7.1% last month. Android 7.0 Nougat rose to 8.9% from 6.6%, while 7.1 Nougat saw a minor increase from 0.5% in May to 0.6% in June.
Android 6.0 Marshmallow maintained its share at 31.2%, same as last month and the month before. However, Marshmallow finally managed to surpass the previous leader in the chart, Lollipop, which now stands at a share of 30.8%, down from 32% last month.
This means that increasingly more smartphones run on the mobile OS version that Google released in 2015, as updates continue to hit phones and tablets. The distribution chart also reveals that KitKat now stands at 18.1%, after seeing a decrease from 18.8% in May.
Gingerbread continues to drop and now reaches a share of 0.8%
Jelly Bean dropped to 8.8% this month, from 9.1% in May, while the distribution share for Ice Cream Sandwich shows stagnation at 0.8%, the same as in May. Gingerbread continues to decrease and now stands at 0.8%, after dropping from 1% last month.
At some point this year or the next, Gingerbread will exit the Android Distribution Chart after it hits the 0.1% mark and only a small share of smartphones and tablets will still run the mobile OS version which was launched quite a while ago. This will happen only after Google releases Android O, which hasn’t been given an official name yet.
Android O will most likely arrive this fall and feature lots of new tools and improvements. Google is expected to release new circular emojis in the next Android version, which already reached its second developer preview version and can be run on Nexus and Pixel smartphones.