KitKat running on 40 percent of Android devices

It's taken over 15 months, but KitKat is now powering almost 40 percent of Android devices visiting the Google Play store.

The data, which is based on smartphones and tablets accessing the Google Play store over a 7-day period ending on February 2, 2015, also shows that Google's newest mobile operating system, version 5 (codenamed Lollipop), is now installed on 1.6 percent of devices.

While this is a significant milestone for Google, it is painfully slow compared to the adoption rate for Apple's iOS 8, which broke the 50 percent in 40 days and currently stands at 69 percent.

With KitKat, along with the now aging Jelly Bean, now powering four out of every five Android devices accessing the Google Play store, the older platforms are slowly being squeezed out. However, they are still likely to remain significant well into this year, and possibly next.

The slow pace of updates means that users stuck on older versions of Android are being left vulnerable to malware and data theft as a result of bugs in the code not being patched. It also forces app developers to support a myriad of what are essentially obsolete versions of Android while simultaneously being unable to fully take advantage of the new Android APIs in their apps.

Also, with Lollipop now beginning to make its presence felt, the importance of KitKat will now wane.

See also:

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