Marshmallow still most popular version of Android with 31% market distribution

Android Oreo was released a few months ago in August but the OS update has had next to no impact on the ecosystem, with new metrics by Google over the first week of November showing that the latest version of Android is currently used on only a minuscule 0.3% of phones.

At the top of the ladder is Marshmallow, with the two-year-old Android version having a massive 30.9% distribution globally. Lollipop comes in second with 27.2%, Nougat in third with 20.6%, and KitKat in fourth with 13.8%. 

Oreo's poor showing comes as no surprise, as only users of the Pixel and Nexus devices, the Huawei Mate 10, and few Xperia devices have finished versions of the update. There's no way such a small population makes up 0.3% of Android users, so we expect the distribution also considers those on Oreo betas and Oreo-based custom ROMs.

Updates are the biggest pain point of being an Android user, as the OS being open source means your chances of getting updates are entirely dependent on the good graces of your OEM, and in some cases, your carrier. Google launched its Project Treble program earlier in the year in the hopes of combating the issue but only devices released on Oreo—and the original Pixel phones—are Treble-enabled, so there's no way the program would have affected Oreo distribution.