Google has officially published the latest Android Distribution Numbers for July 2016. The latest chart shows that Android 6.0 Marshmallow is currently installed on 13.3% of devices. This is a 3.2% improvement, since it hit 10.1%, a month ago.
It isn’t exactly impressive, in fact it is far from it. Android Marshmallow, was released in October 2015, i.e, 9 months ago. And yet, it is only available on very few devices, compared to those running on older versions.
Android 5.0 and 5.1 Lollipop together share 35.1% of installations, while its immediate predecessor, Android 4.4 KitKat holds 30.1%. The former saw its numbers fall by 0.3% from 35.4%, while the latter dropped 1.5% from 31.6%, in June.
Jelly Bean’s usage has dropped from 18.9% to 17.8%. Ice Cream Sandwich saw a 0.2% decrease from 1.9%, while Gingerbread had its numbers cut by 0.1% from 2.0% it held a month ago.
With Android 7.0 Nougat just three months away, it seems all but impossible for Android 6.0 Marshmallow, to overtake Android 5.0/5.1 Lollipop’s numbers. But the blame doesn’t lie with Google, but with OEMs who have notoriously failed to update their devices in time. A few notable examples of very delayed updates: OnePlus only recently launched the Marshmallow update for the OnePlus 2, and so did Honor for the Honor 5x.
This reminds me of Hugo Barra’s recent statement, which claims that Xiaomi has sold 110 Million Devices since the launch of the first Redmi phone in 2013. It does seem a bit far fetched, but more importantly, how many of those devices run on Android 6.0 Marshmallow? Less than 50%? I’d say it would be much lower, like 10-15%.
Xiaomi is one of the OEMs, whose devices, despite being best sellers, continue to run on ancient versions of the operating system, like Android KitKat and Lollipop, which are well over 2 years old. This applies to its most popular phones, the budget friendly mid rangers in the Redmi series. Even the recently launched MIUI 8 update is based on older versions of Android for the majority of its devices, with only a handful, namely the Xiaomi Mi 4, the Mi5, the Mi Max, are getting a taste of Android 6.0 Marshmallow.
But this isn’t the worst thing, because many other OEMs have completely abandoned support for updating their devices, especially for their budget friendly and mid range devices, which sell like hot cakes.
Note: It appears that the Google Dashboard website is experiencing some cache issues, and is still displaying June’s stats. The correct one can be found in the image featured above (courtesy: Android Central).
