The latest market share study of Android usage has been released by Google. It sees Android KitKat 4.4, increase its share to 21% of all Android users, although it still lags behind the older Jelly Bean, which has 26% of all Android users.
This is good news for Android, as fragmentation is a problem, and Google will be happy that the latest version is increasing in use. But the picture may not be as good as it seems. This study is based on data from Google Play Services, and therefore excludes all Android devices running version 2.1 or earlier, as they cannot connect to Google Play. This means the figure of 21% will be smaller in reality.
Nevertheless, KitKat has seen its share increase 4% in a month. Also, Google has been chopping up the Android experience, offering almost all of its services as separate apps that run on many devices, instead of being features locked into a specific Android version. Fragmentation is therefore not as big a problem as it once was.
Apple’s iOS fragmentation is much lower, due to the fact that the company pushes out updates itself. The latest version, iOS 7, has over 87% of the iOS market.
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