Android KitKat now runs on 8.5% of all Android devices, Jelly Bean dominates

AndroidKitkat, Google’s latest version of Android, continues to increase its usage share among Android devices, latest numbers released by Google indicate. While all other variants of Android declined or remained constant, only Android KitKat demonstrated significant change, growing to 8.5 percent of all Android devices from 5.3 percent last month. Variations of Android Jelly Bean, meanwhile remains the most used Android version, powering over 60 percent of all Android devices, a slight decline of less than a percent from last month. Both Ice Cream Sandwich and Gingerbread versions of Android continued to decline.
The growing adoption of KitKat is a good sign for Google but the usage growth isn’t going as fast as Google would like it to happen. Google has no control over what version of Android smartphone vendors put on their devices and more importantly, it can’t force them to provide updates for existing devices.
Instead of waiting for that to happen, Google is slowly decoupling key services and elements of Android from the core platform. It not only enables Google to update them on its own rather than wait for the handset vendor to provide and push an update but also ensures that only those vendors who sign up for Google’s Mobile Services suite of apps get some core features of Android, which were earlier available in the open source version.

TAGS : |