It’s that time of the month again! Android’s platform distribution numbers have officially been updated with the latest numbers for the month of December, 2013. Not just stats for Android fans to praise (or haters to scoff at), this is a tool used by Android developers to track a specific firmware’s grown or decline, deciding whether building their apps to support an older firmware is even worth their time.
This month we have Android 4.4 KitKat making it’s debut in the charts, account for a whopping 1.1% of Android devices that have recently checked into the Google Play Store within the last 7 days. If you expected that number to be a little higher, you weren’t the only one. It appears that even with all these Android devices recently being updated to KitKat — Nexus 4, Nexus 7, Nexus 7 (2013), Motorola Moto X, HTC One Developer Edition and unlocked models — they were little more than a drop in Android’s bucket. Guess it’s going to take Samsung updating their devices to KitKat in order to see a bigger impact.
We’re still hopeful that with KitKat being the lightest version of Android yet, we’ll begin to see more low-end devices launch with 4.4 out-of-the-box (and not Gingerbread). As for the rest of the numbers, Jelly Bean grew to 54.5% (up from last month’s 52.1%), while Ice Cream Sandwich dropped to 18.6% (compared to 19.8% last month). We’re still seeing the slow decline of Gingerbread, dropping from 26.3% in November, to 24.1% this month (most likely due to aging hardware finally kicking the bucket). Ha.
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