While the numbers are not dramatic, Android Marshmallow continues to gain in use and share according to the latest Android Developer Dashboard on versions of Android in use. The latest version of the mobile OS made its debut in the report last month and as of the report today, is on .5% of all devices that went to the Google Play Store for the period ending December 7, 2015. That is up from .3% in the initial report. Although it is far from where everyone would like it to be, the growth is significant in these early days of Marshmallow as it shows more manufactures are getting the update out to their devices.
In comparison however, Android Lollipop still has 29.5% share which actually increased a bit as well over last month while KitKat, the top version out there, fell by nearly 1% which should be expected at this point in the life cycle of the release.
Android Marshmallow Has The Potential To Be Most Widely Used Version
While half-a-percent isn’t a lot to write home about, it is an encouraging sign. Google has stressed to manufactures the need to get updates out, especially given they are releasing security updates on a monthly basis for the platform.
Android Marshmallow
It would appear, based on these numbers and the number of commitments publicly announced by OEMs that they are listening. A multitude of them have already announced or released the Marshmallow update for their devices with more coming this month and the early part of 2016. Add to that a wide range of new devices that are coming with Marshmallow loaded on them, we should see the growth happen at a much greater rate than it did with Lollipop and perhaps even KitKat.
The challenge, as always, seems to be around carriers and their slow release of these updates once they receive them from Google. That causes customer satisfaction issues for them and Google plus it exposes customers unnecessarily to potential security risks in older builds of Android. Seemingly only Apple has been able to get around this by owning all of the update cycles on iOS.
