At the rate the Android 6.0 rollout is going, it just might end up breaking into the top-three most-used flavors of Google's mobile operating system.
Joining the rest of the world in Marshmallow goodness is Canada, getting the update less than a month after it rolled out for the devices in India. It's taken a little bit longer up north for Canadians to get a taste of Marshmallow, but it's finally arriving on Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge devices.
As is well-known, it's not necessarily Samsung's fault for the slower rollout of the next flavor of Android. Albeit, the Korean smartphone maker does heavily stylize the operating system with its own bells and whistles. However, the bottleneck in the release of an update is usually due to the carrier.
In this case, it's Canada's Eastlink, Bell and Telus carriers that are finally catching up. In fact, it's being reported that Eastlink has already sent out the Android 6.0.1 update to its subscribers, with the others soon to follow.
Bell, similarly, has also released the update, but only for the S6 Edge, at the moment. It's not clear why the S6 Edge is getting preferential treatment over the "standard" Galaxy S6, but Telus is following the same order. It is expected to send out the update for the S6 Edge first on April 14, and the update for the regular S6 is to follow four days later, on April 18.
Par for the course when it comes to Android updates, some users are asking when the Galaxy S5 is going to get the Marshmallow treat, too. More likely than not, S5 owners may have to wait quite a bit longer for that. A sign of hope, though, is that the Note 4, which debuted in the same year as the S5, has already received the Marshmallow update in other regions.
At the moment, the latest numbers reveal that Android 6.0 is active on about 4.6 percent of Android phones. That isn't much compared with the strong command that Android 4.4 KitKat currently holds, but Marshmallow's distribution numbers have doubled from 2.3 percent over just a few short months.
As more flagships continue to come out this year in 2016, and as previous generations of those flagship devices get updated, more of the Android market should be catching up to Google's latest mobile software features.
Photo: Tony Webster | Flickr
