The latest Android Distribution Report has been made available and the numbers for Android Oreo are still anemic. After being available for 8 months, the latest version of Android is on only 5.7% of devices that came to the Google Play Store for the 7-day period ending May 7, 2018. That is an improvement of 1.1% over the April report but still shows the significant upgrade challenge Android faces.
If there is good news it is that the last two version of Android, Nougat and Oreo, are the only two in this month’s report that gained any usage. Nougat was up .3% and remains the most widely used version of Android at 31.1%.
All other previous versions of Android stayed static in their install base or had small drops. That too is a positive but given the number of versions that are still supported by Google, it adds to the upgrade challenge.
Android Distribution Report – May 2018
Google, for their part, is trying to change this with requirements of new devices having to run Oreo and any device upgraded to Oreo having to support Project Treble which makes upgrading the base OS separate from the manufacture updates. In the future, this should help the adoption of new versions of Android but realistically, that is still a year out.
