Android Nougat Now Running on 15.8 Percent of Active Devices, Oreo Not on Chart: Google

While all the news this week is revolving around Apple and the buzz it created around the iPhone X, iPhone 8, and iPhone 8 Plus, Google has released its Android platform distribution chart for the month of September. The chart shows that Android Nougat continuing to gain market share, with its presence now on almost 15.8 percent active devices. However, the latest Android Oreo version could not find its place in the chart for the same month - notably, Android versions with less than 0.1 percent share of active devices aren't listed, implying Oreo is currently on fewer than those many devices.

In June this year, the Android Nougat version was found running on 10 percent of active devices. Then in July and August, Android Nougat reached 10.6 percent and 13.5 percent respectively. The total share of Android Nougat for September has now hit 15.8 percent, which includes 12.3 percent of devices on the Android 7.0 Nougat version and 1.2 percent of devices on Android 7.1 Nougat.

The new statistics show that Android Marshmallow continues to dominate with up to 32.2 percent share. The distribution share for Android Marshmallow has declined, but fell just 0.1 percent from the last month's number that stood at 32.3 percent.

In addition to Android Marshmallow, all other Android versions have also declined. These builds include Android Gingerbread (at 0.6 percent share) and Ice Cream Sandwich (with 0.6 percent share) - which both fell 0.1 percent. Jelly Bean at 6.9 percent share, fell 0.7 percent. KitKat, currently at 15.1 percent share, fell 0.9 percent, while Lollipop, with a share of 28.8 percent, fell 0.4 percent.

Google says that this data has been collected during a 7-day period that concluded on September 11, and Android builds with less than 0.1 percent share have been excluded. It should also be kept in mind that Google takes only those Android devices into account that support Google Play (which itself supports Android 2.2 and above).

Google's latest version Android Oreo officially rolled out to Pixel and Nexus devices a few days ago and it will take more than a month to get itself a substantial share in the Android platform distribution chart, as per recent trends.

The distribution chart also goes on to mention the OpenGL ES distribution amongst the active devices. While the latest OpenGL versions are not there in the chart, a major portion is dominated by OpenGL version 3.0 - standing at 45.8 percent, rising 0.2 percent. The other two versions in the chart are OpenGL 2.0 with 37.3 percent share (declining 0.3 percent) and OpenGL 3.1 with 16.9 percent distribution share (rising 0.1 percent). Note that support for a certain version means that it also supports any lower versions of OpenGL API, Google says in its developers blog post.