While trying to understand adoption patterns of new mobile OS versions, I decided to plot data from the Android Dashboard and Apple’s pie-chart, with help from the Wayback Machine. I’ll try to keep the charts updated going forwards. Feel free to hover; they are interactive.
The charts confirm our common knowledge: new Android versions take long to reach a reasonably good share of the userbase compared to new iOS versions where 70% adoption is reached within a month. This can be explained by the major differences in the platforms; Apple controls the devices while Google doesn’t; Google needs to wait for manufactures to push updates. Let’s hope that project Treble will improve things for Android in a year or so. The tail is a different story; old versions take a long time to disappear on both ecosystems - I assume this is due to older devices where updates may not be available but users hang on to.
Note that Apple does not publish as detailed data as Google. Typically Apple’s chart is updated less often and at any point in time only percentages for latest, latest-1 and ‘other’ are published.
One more view of the Android data: