While the news of Android Marshmallow has been dominating things these past few weeks, that doesn’t mean that Android Lollipop is dead by any means. Google has updated their Developer Dashboard and the latest figures through October 5th, just yesterday, indicates that Android Lollipop is seeing its highest install base ever at 23.5%. These numbers come from Google and represent the version of Android run on devices that signed into the Google Play Store over the course of the past 7 days. While it is by no means complete or 100% accurate, it does give a good indicator of just where the Android install base is currently.
Despite this growth in install base, Lollipop is still considerably further behind Android KitKat which has a base of 38.9% of devices. All told though, it means that the last two versions of Android
Android Version Install Base as of Oct 5 2015
account for 62.4% of the total install base. That’s good given the seemly monthly dire discussions of Android fragmentation. The fragmentation is there but not nearly as bad as it is sometimes portrayed.
Next month this same report should start giving us Android Marshmallow figures and it will be interesting to see how fast it climbs in the install base. Given that the update is already rolling out to Nexus devices and many OEMs (HTC, Samsung, Sony and Motorola) and carriers (T-Mobile) have committed to getting updates out for many of their devices, it should increase at a better clip than Lollipop has enjoyed.
