Google has updated the company's Platform Versions page for its Android mobile operating system, revealing that Android 5.0 Lollipop is gaining a bit of ground among users compared to last month.
Android 5.0 Lollipop, the latest version of the mobile operating system, was able to post an adoption rate of more than 1 percent, cutting into the increase of users on Android 4.4 KitKat, which was the version released before Android 5.0 Lollipop.
Android 4.4 KitKat is the only other Android version to improve its adoption share in the most recent iteration of the report, which collected data over a period of seven days that ended on Feb. 2.
Android 5.0 Lollipop's first percentage of adoption share comes after three months from the debut of the Nexus 9 smartphone, which is the first mobile device that was powered by Android 5.0 Lollipop. This is the first time that the latest version of Android has shown up in the report, as adoption of Android 5.0 Lollipop was negligible in previous versions, with Google stating that versions with less than 0.1 percent adoption rates are not included in the report.
Android 5.0 Lollipop now has 1.6 percent of the adoption share for Android versions, with Android 4.4 KitKat improving its share by 0.6 percent to 39.7 percent.
Android 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3 Jelly Bean decreased in their collective adoption rates by 1.5 percent to 44.5 percent, Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich decreased its adoption share by 0.3 percent to 6.4 percent, Android 2.3 Gingerbread decreased its adoption share by 0.4 percent to 7.4 percent and Android 2.2 Froyo's adoption share remained unchanged at 0.4 percent.
The Platform Versions page gathers data from the Google Play Store app, which can be found only on devices running Android 2.2 or later. This means that the reports do not include any devices powered by older versions of Android nor Android devices, such as Amazon's Fire gadgets, that do not have Google Play installed.
The massively slow increase in the adoption share for Android 5.0 Lollipop can be attributed to the lukewarm popularity of the Nexus line of devices, in addition to the slow rollout of the updated mobile operating system by Android device manufacturers for their own products.
The increase rate in the adoption share for Android 5.0 Lollipop seems to be even much slower compared to the launch of previous updates to the operating system. However, with the pending launch of several Android devices in the upcoming Mobile World Conference, the adoption share of Android 5.0 Lollipop could see an uptick in the near future.
Users that have not upgraded their Android devices to run on the latest versions of the operating system are exposed to malware and other security threats.
