One of Android’s biggest strengths is also its biggest weakness. As we’ve discussed before, the fact that Android gives us thousands of different smartphones is great for choice, price differentiation and customisation, but it means developers have to spend more time one apps to cater for these different phone sizes, hardware specs, form factors and so on.
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It’s called fragmentation, and its why certain Android smartphones may only get one year’s update to the newest version of Android. On the other hand, five-year-old iPhones got the newest version of its mobile software – iOS 14. It is one of the reasons Google Pixels or other phones running near stock Android usually offer our favourite software experience on Android, because you will get the latest version of Android quicker and up to three or four years, extending the life of your phone.
So what does this problem look like on Android at the end of 2020? Let’s take a look at the different Android versions still is use and how these versions are distributed among users.
The latest version of Android was launched in September of this year – only 1.4 percent of the billions of Android phones currently run the latest version of the software, Android 11. This will only be new devices sold recently and the aforementioned devices running stock Android or very lightly skinned devices (like OnePlus or Motorola). The percentage share for the other currently running versions look like follows:
What we all want to see is Android becoming less fragmented, and it seems to be happening, albeit very slowly. The take-up rate for Android 11 is slightly higher at this point after launch than previous versions.
Android (and by that we mean Google) has a lot of work to do to decrease fragmentation. Google has been trying to work with its vendors as much as possible – some are more willing to cooperate than others.
