Google used to provide us with monthly updates on the adoption numbers of the various Android OS versions out there, but it stopped sharing those stats recently. Today, though, we're getting a bit of a glimpse into how widespread Android 10 has become.
Google revealed today that Android 10 adoption has grown faster than any previous versions of Android. Five months after its launch, Android 10 was running on 100 million devices, which is 28 percent faster than Android 9 Pie.
Also released today is a chart that shows that Android 10 has hit 400 million active users in approximately 10 months. In that same amount of time, Android 9 Pie was just shy of 300 million users and Android 8 Oreo was around 100 million.
Looking ahead, Google says it's making some updatability improvements to Android 11. These include helping other device makers to offer Android 11 developer previews for non-Pixel phones, with seven OEMs releasing dev previews for 13 devices.
Google is also making more OS components updateable. There are nine more parts of Android that can be updated separately with Android 11, like Tethering and Wi-Fi, meaning there's now a total of 21 OS components that are updatable separately.
Other updatability improvements Google is making include creating a Generic Kernel Image that enables faster security deployments and a new Virtual A/B OTA mechanism that can apply updates in the background, making them appear seamless, while taking up less storage than A/B OTAs previously consumed.
Apple revealed last month that iOS 13 is now on 92 percent of recent iPhone models and 81 percent of every iPhone being used right now. Android 10 is still pretty far off from those stats — Google said one year ago that there were 2.5 billion active Android devices — but it's also unlikely that a single Android update is going to see the same kind of widespread use as iOS because there's so many different Android OEMs and devices out there.
All that said, it is good to see Android OS adoption rates continue to grow and we're glad that Google is continuing to work to improve the updatability of Android.
Which version of Android are you currently running?
