7 Months After Its Official Release, Lollipop Creeps To 9% Of Android Device Market

Terry Myerson, Microsoft's Executive Vice President of Operating Systems, really stuck a knife into Google’s stomach yesterday at the Microsoft Ignite conference. More specifically, Myerson took issue with Google’s reluctance to prod its carrier partners into delivering timely OS updates for devices that run Android.

"Google ships a big pile of… code, with no commitment to update your device," Myerson said yesterday when referencing the current state of Android fragmentation. "Google takes no responsibility to update customer devices and refuses to take responsibility to update their devices, leaving end users and businesses increasingly exposed every day they use an Android device."

Myerson can probably add a little more gasoline to his Android bonfire courtesy of new market share numbers for Android 5.x Lollipop. Lollipop was announced in late June 2014 and made it way to the first crop of eligible devices on November 12, 2014. Seven months later, Lollipop is installed on just 9 percent of all Android devices worldwide.

When the Android Distribution numbers were released early last month, just over 5 percent of devices were running Lollipop. One month later, we’re at 9 percent which can be attributed to carriers finally getting around to releasing the OS to legacy hardware and new flagship releases like the HTC One M9 and Samsung Galaxy S6/Galaxy S6 Edge.

But while Lollipop has made significant gains in just one month, the most popular Android distribution continues to be KitKat with a 39.8 percent share. Interestingly enough, Jellybean is not far behind with a 39.2 percent share.

As more flagships enter the market (we’re looking at you, LG G4) and carrier updates continue to stream out, we should see Lollipop number slowly increase over the next few months.