The latest Android distribution numbers are out and good old KitKat is still king.
With more than a third of Android devices still running Android 4.4 KitKat, its stronghold of 33.4 percent easily overshadows that of any other version of the Android OS.
Android 6.0 Marshmallow, for example, is a few months old and commands only a 4.6 percent share over the other remaining flavors of Google's mobile operating system.
The good news, however, is that adoption of Marshmallow has doubled from 2.3 percent to 4.6 percent as of April of this year. This could be due to the rest of the major smartphone manufacturers releasing the latest Android updates to their handsets.
Samsung, for example, has been on a roll recently in releasing Android 6.0 Marshmallow to last year's flagship devices like the Galaxy S6, S6 Edge, Note 4, and Note 5, among others.
In terms of the remaining versions of Android, including Froyo, Gingerbread, Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean, KitKat, and Lollipop, all of them have gone down in adoption numbers.
Versions with less than 0.1 percent use by consumers aren't revealed in Google's latest breakdown. Nonetheless, it is still surprising to see that there are 0.1 percent and 2.6 percent of Android devices out there still running over five-year-old software with Froyo and Gingerbread, respectively.
Overall, the numbers seem to prove that Marshmallow is gaining momentum at the expense of its earlier revisions. That makes enough sense since as we move further into the future, older devices and the software that runs on them will eventually get phased out to make way for the new ones.
Come later this year, however, the Android landscape is yet again set to shuffle with the arrival of Google's next version of its mobile operating system, Android N.
In a surprise early leak released by Google, the announcement did throw some wrenches into the machineries that run both large and small device makers' software roadmap. OnePlus and Nextbit are barely just readying for Android 6.0.1 later this month or early May.
We expect to see a final version of Android N revealed just in time for Google's three-day I/O Developer Conference in Mountain View a little over a month from now.
