Category: Android KitKat

Version 3.0 of Android Messages, Google’s SMS app, has started rolling out in the Google Play Store today.  While it doesn’t sport a lot of changes, mostly bug fixes and performance improvements, it does drop support for Android KitKat.

KitKat was released back in October 2013 so dropping support for the now 4 year and a bit year old version is not entirely shocking and it fits with Google upping the minimum supported API level in other apps.  Frankly, at this point nobody should be using KitKat purely from a security perspective.

Let’s all have a moment of silence for a dearly departed friend, Android Froyo.

(silence)

Google has just released the latest Android Platform Report and the nearly 6 year old Froyo is no longer on the report.  The report is based on devices that came to the Google Play Store for the week ending January 9, 2017.  While certainly not a definitive resource when it comes to the Android install base, it is a solid resource that gives some great insights to just what versions of Android are out there and in use.  The news for Nougat is that installs still remain low.  The latest version of Android only accounted for .7% of the devices hitting the store, miles behind Marshmallow at 29.6% and even further behind leader Lollipop, which sits at 33.4% of visitors.  Still, that Nougat number is a .3% increase over last month but equally, Marshmallow jumped up 3.3% for the report.  For the rest of the versions, numbers declined.

Android Lollipop dropped .6% to 33.4% while KitKat had the biggest drop of 1.4% to 22.6%.  Jelly Bean dropped to 11.6%, down from 12.8%, Ice Cream Sandwich dropped .1% to 1.1% and finally, the now quite crusty Gingerbread release dropped to 1%.

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.