More people are using Android 2.2 Froyo than Lollipop

[Shawn Knight]

Android 5.0 Lollipop has been billed as one of the biggest and most important updates to Google’s mobile operating system but even that reputation has done little to help with one major issue: fragmentation.

Lollipop was first made available as an over-the-air update on November 12 yet after nearly two months in the wild, it hasn’t even made a blip on the radar according to Google’s latest official data.

Google’s developer dashboard, which collected data about devices running the latest Google Play Store app during a 7-day period ending January 5, reveals that less than 0.1 percent of devices are running Android 5.0 Lollipop.

As you can see in the graphic above, Lollipop isn’t even listed. That’s because the list excludes any version of Android that is installed on less than 0.1 percent of devices.

Such fragmentation isn’t a huge surprise when you consider how few devices currently have access to the update. Outside of Google’s family of Nexus devices (Nexus 4, Nexus 5, Nexus 6, Nexus 7 and Nexus 10), Samsung’s Galaxy S5 is the only handset I’m aware of that has had the update released for it and only in a few select regions.

Android 4.4 KitKat, meanwhile, has seen its adoption rate increase substantially in recent months. As of early November, KitKat was installed on 30.2 percent of devices. That figure has since climbed to 39.1 percent.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/59356-more-people-using-android-22-froyo-than-lollipop.html

 

[Guest]

I already have it for two weeks now on my LG G3.

 

[Arris]

Well, it's hardly surprising as stated near the end of the article the update is only available to few devices, Google Nexus line and the other brand phones which come in a "Google Play Store" edition. Once all the other manufacturers make their skinned updates available I'm sure that Lollipop will quickly pass Froyo and probably Kitkat(as all the Kitkat users get the update) in usage. Can't really comment at this time about slow adoption for something that isn't really available yet to the majority of Android users.

 

[indiangamer]

I am also using it from 1 month on my Moto X 2nd gen

 

[9Nails]

Is it a Google problem that hardware manufactures aren't updating drivers and releasing the latest Android OS for their devices? Or is it the device manufacturer's fault?

 

[insect]

Its out for HTC One m8 and possibly the m7 also.

Further, this is more technological ignorance than anything. A lot of devices can get and run Lollipop, but you need to unlock your bootloader and install a custom ROM. There are a lot of lists out there on XDA on how to do this for just about every phone ever made.

Carriers hate pushing OTAs because there CAN be things that go wrong and they don't want to deal with it. When you're phone breaks, you don't call Google, you call your carrier who will probably have no idea how to fix it to begin with. Carriers' fault - they just wait for peoples phones to get old and for them to upgrade to a phone running it natively and then rarely push an OTA for those anyway.

I'm running 5.0.2 right now via CyanogenMod on the m8.

 

[drjekelmrhyde]

Is it a Google problem that hardware manufactures aren't updating drivers and releasing the latest Android OS for their devices? Or is it the device manufacturer's fault?

OEMs know that you will just buy another phone in less than 2 years anyway.

 

[wiyosaya]

IF it were available for my Galaxy Tab 3, I would be running it right now. It is not available, though, and as far as I can tell, there is no word from Samsung as to whether it will be released for the Tab 3 series.

 

[lripplinger]

I still have the Motorola Milestone X and it is running Android 2.3.5!

 

[JohnCB]

Had it on both my Nexus Tablets and manually reverted to KitKat. Even after wiping cache and doing a reset/reinstall, it always felt sluggish. It's probably perception being forced to watch unnecessary animations but regardless it felt slow.

Not to mention the ridiculousness of a single pull-down menu that is a mere couple inches wide on a horizontal 7" display. Won't be bothering to go back to lollipop until they optimize for tablet screens.

 

[Guest]

Neither my Moto G 2013 nor my Nexus 7 LTE tablet have Lollipop, which I'm fairly pissed about. Both were supposed to be OTA updated in November, then it became December, now I've stopped holding my breath. And I won't be buying Google-branded devices in the future.

 

[tipstir]

Android doesn't want to fix the prior releases of the OS. So they just patch it up and call it another Spot-Light-Name that's catchy. I've been programming in Android since 2010 the code is Linux base and its pretty old code. They could have fixed Donut 1.6, Eclair 2.1, Froyo 2.2, Gingerbread 2.3, Honeycomb 3, ICS 4.x, Jelly Bean 4x, Kitkat 4.x, Lolipop 5. If Netflix just supported old CPU 600 MHz and up instead of 1 GHz and up. You would have seen these figures change more.