Every month, Google releases the Android distribution numbers to show developers the most popular ones and help them develop apps accordingly. The numbers for August have already been released and Android Jelly Bean is still popular but KitKat usage has increased significantly to 20.9%. The data for August was collected between August 5 and August 12.
KitKat was released late last year and to rise to 20.9% in less than a year is really awesome. The huge number of devices running KitKat is attributed to the number of flagship devices that have been unveiled since October last year running KitKat. It is also due to the huge number of devices being updated to KitKat by manufacturers. In July, KitKat had only 17.9%market share while in June it had 13.6% so this has been a steady growth for some time now.
Android Jelly Bean is still the most popular version with 54.2% market share. This combines Android 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3. This number has dropped slightly from last month’s figures. Android 2.3 Ginger bread is still holding huge numbers at 13.6% market share. This is followed closely by Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich that controls 10.6% of all Android devices. Android 2.2 Froyo is still floating around with 0.7% of devices. The remaining Android versions i.e. Honeycomb & Éclair are not listed as they control an insignificant number of less than 0.1%.
At this point we are still waiting for Google to release their latest version, Android L to the public as it is still available in developers version. It will be interesting to see how Android L affects these numbers. Hopefully it will help do away with the earlier versions such as Froyo and Ginger bread.