[krschultz]

Damn lies and statistics. The Android dashboard numbers are always super pessimistic on upgrade rate.

I am the lead for an app with >250,000 installs. Over 45% of our usage is coming from Lollipop. The rest is JB & KK. We see <6% ICS for the last 30 days.

I know other major apps that have even better numbers.

Looking at my data, L usage was basically nil in January 2015. There was slow growth from there until April, when we saw an inflection point in the number of Lollipop users. This aligned with the release of several Samsung updates that pushed Lollipop to some of the most popular devices out there.

If you want publicly available numbers, I would rely on Mixpanel[1] not the Android dashboard. And even this understates it, as of writing this comment Mixpanel is not including 5.1 in the Lollipop numbers which is cutting 2-3% off that. [2]

[1] https://mixpanel.com/trends/#report/android_os_adoption [2] https://twitter.com/mixpanel/status/604025242529308672

The narrative about Android fragmentation is really out of touch with what I experience on a daily basis.

[rob_lh]

That's some awesome data, thanks for sharing! I have to imagine geo matters here too. China, Latin America, and Africa have huge Android growth (though even then a huge chunk must be AOSP) but I would guess it's mostly older OS versions coming from the smaller OEMs that are spawning so much of the growth. Who knows if those would ever be updated, but it's less relevant unless you're a pervasive, global app (like FB or Gmail).

[kuschku]

As someone developing another Android app, a FOSS app for an IRC bouncer:

About 25% of our users are below ICS even. Yes, one quarter of our users are on Gingerbread.

And then the rest is shared equally between JB, KK and L.

[erispoe]

I'm curious of what kind of app you're developing. You and krschultz seem to work on apps adressing a quite different audience.

[yareally]

The Android Market lets you depreciate old versions of Android now for your apps by leaving up the last compatible apk for them while newer devices get the latest version of your app.

With that, you can either let the old version die slowly as users upgrade devices. I haven't attempted it, but I assume you can still somehow push bugfixes for the older version without newer devices also getting it.

[kuschku]

But then those people wouldn’t get the normal upstream releases anymore, and we’d have to setup a branch for backports – not really great.

[yareally]

Backporting bug fixes or new features? I wouldn't be going out of my way to try adding new features to 5 year old versions of Android. If a user reports a crash for 2.3, sure, I will fix it. I know I have a fair amount of devices showing as Android 2.3 for one of my apps, but I've noticed most of them seem to be inactive. The app in question is a tool for testers and power users, so I would expect many of them to keep old devices around for fun/hobby, but not really using them actively.

Just something you might want to investigate. You may not have as many actively using 2.3 as you might think. Creating a new branch for active build really isn't that much complexity and then a branch for legacy when the legacy is just maintenance mode only.

[kuschku]

We are talking only about people who installed the latest version of the app – so they had to be online, and had updates activated, within of the past few weeks.

[guelo]

I just checked a >1million install app, it has 36% 4.4, 27% 5.0, 4% 5.1.

[27182818284]

I would imagine much more people have the Play Store installed than the 250,000 installs of your application. It seems reasonable then to point to Google's own page for the better count.

https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html?ut...

[gusmd]

This is very good news, thanks for sharing that.

I'm learning Android development by building a basic app that I've always wanted but couldn't find in the play store. I'm targeting SDK 21 and minSDK 19 and was afraid of having a small userbase (based on the dashboard numbers). That means that I can continue to focus on the latest SDK and leverage all the good SDK 21 features :)

[krschultz]

If you are working on a side project type app my best advice would be min SDK 19 or even 21. The total # of Android users in the world makes even the minority that are on L a large userbase. You will get much further faster not having to deal with backwards compatibility. If your app is aimed at making money, the people with money are generally on the newer versions. Not everyone can get away with it (Facebook will be supporting Gingerbread forever), but don't waste your time on the old versions if you can avoid it.

[mattei]

Awesome Mixpanel trends reports. For comparison iOS8 adoption according to Mixpanel, >85%. Very fast adoption since iOS8 release ~8 months ago. https://mixpanel.com/trends/#report/ios_8/from_date:-270,rep...

[threeseed]

It has been rumored that for iOS9 Apple will be focusing on reducing the overall footprint.

There are a lot of 8GB devices that could be upgraded to iOS8 but are unable to because of lack of disk space.

[leonatan]

What 8GB devices? Even iPod Touch starts at 16GB and is supported.

[threeseed]

iPhone 4S and iPhone 5C in 8GB configuraitons are still being sold around the world. They are both capable of iOS8.

http://store.apple.com/us/buy-iphone/iphone5c/iphone-5c-8gb-...

And by disk space I mean after the user has installed the typical number of apps, photos, music etc. My partner is an example of this. She has to choose between deleting apps and doing OS updates.