Google Updates Its Android 4.4 KitKat Availability in January 2014
As the recent numbers suggest, Google has updated its Android distribution numbers today, revealing the fact that Jelly Bean has reached almost 60 percent of devices while the KitKat firmware takes only 1.4 percent. We know that if things run slowly, the result will not last appear. However, in the case of KitKat, things appear to be quite slow. Based on data collected by Google at the beginning of the year, Android 4.4 takes only 1.4 of all Android devices.
These new numbers mean an increase of 0.3 percent compared to the last month’s statistics, but it is, in fact, an increase. It appears that the situation is getting even better, especially with Android 4.3 and Android 4.2 rising while the Google flagship is slowly decreasing. In the case of new devices, both mid-end and high-end mostly use a semi-recent release.
As a matter of fact, along with the famous CES event held in Los Angeles, tech fans all over the world expected to see many more devices running Google’s latest firmware. In fact, things were quite the opposite. Very few of the devices unveiled within the event ran or are planned to run on Android 4.4 KitKat.
In the same time, numbers have revealed a decrease in the Ice Cream Sandwich situation, which reached 16.9 percent, and in the case of Gingerbread, where the distribution has reached a level of 21.2 percent of devices. Perhaps, these both percents will slowly decrease in time as new devices will gain popularity and they will be running on Google’s latest firmware.
In the case of the device manufacturers, most of them choose to stick and run an older Android version, a version that is more familiar, safe, and tested. Here, we speak mostly of devices that are a little bit special, devices that are not a part of the traditional Android mold, such as all-in-one computers, or dual-booting tablets. In this way, they do not risk of experiencing problems and bugs.
As far as the Android 4.4 KitKat is concerned, the firmware was advertised to work on regular and mid-end smartphones, which have medium resources. In this case, we would expect to see a bigger increase since most of the people own at least a mid-end device. There is time to see KitKat installed on all of our Android-based devices and perhaps this time, is not that far away.
Source: AndroidCommunity
