Newsletter
Earlier this week we saw the distribution numbers for June, which showed KitKat sitting at 13.6% which is still lower than the nearly 4-year old OS of Gingerbread which has 14.9% still. We also saw Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, taking stabs at Android saying that half of Android users are sitting on a four-year-old OS. Which simply isn’t true. Last time I checked, 15% was not half. Maybe my math is wrong, I have been out of school for a bit so it might be.
Nonetheless, Chitika has put out a new report today showing the top versions of Android in the US. Surprisingly, KitKat is the second most used version of Android here in the US. Jelly Bean is first at 47%, KitKat at 37%, ICS at 8% and Gingerbread at 7%. We also have Froyo on the board at about 1%. That’s a big change, if this were a year ago, I doubt we’d see that high of a number of people on Android 4.2. So Google is definitely doing something to fix updates, and it’s been needed for quite some time.
Chitika also released another graph that shows how quickly manufacturers are updating their devices to Android 4.4. The list really isn’t surprising. But we have Google, followed By Motorola, HTC, Samsung and LG coming in last. They’ve all gotten much quicker in pushing out updates in the past year, especially HTC and LG. With LG you never really expected an update, and HTC you’d get it a year later. Now HTC is pushing them out ahead of Samsung – which is quite a feat in of itself – and LG is actually pushing out updates, almost before Samsung as well.
It’s great to see these changes happening. We always want to see everyone getting on the latest version of Android, as Google always has some cool tricks up its sleeve with new version of Android, not to mention the security fixes.
