The November Android Distribution Report has been released by the Android team at Google and it reflect improvement in adoption of the latest two major versions of the platform. Only Android Nougat (7.x) and Android Oreo (8.x) showed gains in this months reports, with all previous versions showing declines.
For those who may be new to Android, each month Google releases an Android Distribution Report that reflects the versions of Android that hit the Play Store over the course of a 7-day period. This month’s report was for the seven days ending November 9, 2017.
The biggest loser in this month’s report was Marshmallow (6.x). It saw a 1.1% drop in usage, down to 30.9% over the October report. Marshmallow remains the most widely used version of Android at that 30.9% with Android Lollipop (5.x) a close second at 27.2%. Lollipop, like Marshmallow, saw a drop but only by .5%.
As for Android Nougat, it saw a jump of 2.8% for the November report, putting it on 20.6% of the devices that hit the Play Store for the week of the report. That puts Nougat third on the usage list while Oreo, the latest version of Android, grew a meager .1% to put it at .3% for the report.
The poor numbers for Oreo are certainly not new. Nougat and Marshmallow before it saw low adoption numbers for 6 months after they were released and it appears that the latest version of Android is on the same trajectory. With new devices coming in the final quarter of 2017 and upgrades to existing devices starting to roll out, the December report should be a bit better for 8.x but how much better is hard to determine.
You can read the full report on the Android Developers Dashboard site.
Android Distribution Report – November 2017
