While all the news this week is revolving around Apple and
the buzz it created around the iPhone X, iPhone 8, and iPhone 8 Plus, Google
has released its Android platform distribution chart for the month of
September. The chart shows that Android Nougat continuing to gain market share,
with its presence now on almost 15.8 percent active devices. However, the
latest Android Oreo version could not find its place in the chart for the same
month - notably, Android versions with less than 0.1 percent share of active
devices aren't listed, implying Oreo is currently on fewer than those many
devices.
In June this year, the Android Nougat version was found
running on 10 percent of active devices. Then in July and August, Android
Nougat reached 10.6 percent and 13.5 percent respectively. The total share of
Android Nougat for September has now hit 15.8 percent, which includes 12.3
percent of devices on the Android 7.0 Nougat version and 1.2 percent of devices
on Android 7.1 Nougat.
The new statistics show that Android Marshmallow continues
to dominate with up to 32.2 percent share. The distribution share for Android
Marshmallow has declined, but fell just 0.1 percent from the last month's
number that stood at 32.3 percent.
In addition to Android Marshmallow, all other Android
versions have also declined. These builds include Android Gingerbread (at 0.6
percent share) and Ice Cream Sandwich (with 0.6 percent share) - which both
fell 0.1 percent. Jelly Bean at 6.9 percent share, fell 0.7 percent. KitKat,
currently at 15.1 percent share, fell 0.9 percent, while Lollipop, with a share
of 28.8 percent, fell 0.4 percent.
Google says that this data has been collected during a 7-day
period that concluded on September 11, and Android builds with less than 0.1
percent share have been excluded. It should also be kept in mind that Google
takes only those Android devices into account that support Google Play (which
itself supports Android 2.2 and above).
Google's latest version Android Oreo officially rolled out
to Pixel and Nexus devices a few days ago and it will take more than a month to
get itself a substantial share in the Android platform distribution chart, as
per recent trends.
The distribution chart also goes on to mention the OpenGL ES
distribution amongst the active devices. While the latest OpenGL versions are
not there in the chart, a major portion is dominated by OpenGL version 3.0 -
standing at 45.8 percent, rising 0.2 percent. The other two versions in the
chart are OpenGL 2.0 with 37.3 percent share (declining 0.3 percent) and OpenGL
3.1 with 16.9 percent distribution share (rising 0.1 percent). Note that
support for a certain version means that it also supports any lower versions of
OpenGL API, Google says in its developers blog post.
