Google doesn’t really need to worry about iOS’ new features. The company has its own dragons to train – rather, own users to train.
To train them to upgrade to newer versions of Android.
Take a look at the market share of different versions of Android: Marshmallow is clearly the winner (FYI: Ice cream sandwich has more adoption than Oreo).
- Oreo has 0.2% market share.
- Ice Cream Sandwich is at 0.6%.
- Nougat is only at 17.8%.
- Kitkat stands at 14.5%
- Marshmallow is at 32%, followed by Lolipop (27.7%)
What does this really translate to?
Surely, Android has improved a lot over the last few years – but these innovations / improvements aren’t really hitting the user’s device.
iOS 11 adoption
iOS 11, which isn’t the best iOS version out there (buggy updates) has seen ~42.6% adoption within few days of launch.
For Google, the decision to keep innovating on Android vs. ensuring that innovations actually sees adoption is the real question. Will HTC deal help Google in controlling fragmentation? Your guess is as good as mine.
If you are an Android developer building for consumer market – what’s your preferred OS version?
