It's that time again—Google has updated the developer dashboard with new platform distribution numbers. After bidding Froyo a long-overdue farewell a few months ago, there hasn't been a great deal of movement. Nougat got off to a slow start, but it's finally picking up steam this month. It's still only on a fraction of devices, though.
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The time has finally come to say a fond farewell to Gingerbread. In a manner of speaking, that is. Back in November, Google announced Play services v10.0 would be the last release to support Android 2.3. In fact, Honeycomb was simultaneously deprecated as the minimum supported version was elevated to API level 14, also known as Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. As Play services v10.2 completes its wide rollout to Android devices, that time has officially come. Google posted a list of changes to Play services v10.2 and featured the news about leaving Gingerbread behind.
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Like clockwork, the February distribution numbers are out, and while it's not a milestone like last month when Froyo finally died, there are still some important things to take note of.
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Today is a big day for Android, nay, for all of us. After nearly seven years, Android 2.2 Froyo has finally dropped off the platform distribution numbers. Our Froyo Deathwatch has ended. That's not all that happened this month, but everything else is fairly routine.
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December's Android platform distribution numbers are up and... not much exciting has changed in the last month, to be honest. The only real milestone we're seeing is that Android 4.4 KitKat is finally no longer the most common API level of the platform, having been usurped by Android 6.0 Marshmallow. KitKat's dominant streak was around two years - let's hope Marshmallow doesn't sit on the throne that long.
This does mean that the most common version of the platform is now only two API versions behind the most recent version (Android 7.1, API level 25). The reason KitKat was so long dominant is that Android 5.0 and 5.1 were split into two platform versions because of their differing API levels.
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Android 2.3 Gingerbread, according to Google, still runs on approximately 1.3% of devices hitting the Play Store every month. But with Google Play Services 10.0.x, Google is placing an end-marker for the OS's support of the Play Services package going forward, which signals what is essentially the final death of the platform as far as Google is concerned. When Play Services 10.2 arrives, it will leave behind Android's crunchiest iteration.
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Android platform distributions for the first week of November are up, and Nougat has appeared... with 0.3% of the pie. But it's there! The only other really noteworthy change came from Marshmallow, which surged 5.3 points to 24% of total devices. As such, it seems likely that Marshmallow will unseat KitKat as the most common version of the Android platform next month, at least if we're counting by API level. If you're counting by whole-digit version, Lollipop is in the lead, and has been for some time.
But KitKat has held this position of dominance for, well, a really long time (probably around two years).
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September's platform distribution numbers for Android are now available, and... they're dully predictable. Marshmallow's growth returned to the levels we saw in July, gaining 3.5 points versus its position a month ago. Lollipop has returned to a net decline, with v5.0 losing a full point of the pie and 5.1's half-point increase not being able to make up for it. That means Lollipop, combined, is on 35% of all Android devices Google counted versus Marshmallow's 18.7%.
KitKat dropped 1.5 points, Jelly Bean (all versions) collectively dipped a meager 1.1 points, and Ice Cream Sandwich and Gingerbread barely budged from their previous positions.
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Android's Platform Distribution chart has been updated for August, and this month brings little in the way of interesting change. Marshmallow has risen around 1.9 points, to 15.2% of installs, with Lollipop 5.0 and 5.1 actually netting a 0.4 point gain this time around. Last month, total Lollipop installs actually dropped around 0.3 points, meaning this month's increased numbers have actually reversed that change and then some. Given that 5.0 installs didn't actually grow - gains were made solely by v5.1 - it's not exactly clear what happened there. Perhaps a large number of devices have gone straight from KitKat to Android 5.1, though that's an awful strange time for a jump.
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Google seems to really love tinkering with its Clock app. The latest version of the app, 4.2, should be rolling out in the Play Store now. This one is available to everyone running Android 4.4 or higher (we didn't grab it from one of the Android M preview builds). It has exactly one new notable feature: the ability to gradually increase alarm volume, which is a fairly typical feature of alarm apps (and even real, physical clocks). The rest is a bunch of visual tweaking.
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