Android OS Still a Fragmented Market

Android’s newest OS began its release last week, with phone manufacturers expected to start updating the operating systems of their newest phones in the coming weeks. Google’s mobile operating system is fragmented, which leads to this trickle of updates across manufacturers. The launch schedule for many phones is still unknown.

With a new update, comes a new name. Android is ditching one of its sweetest traits, its naming convention. Android’s trademark OS used alphabetical dessert names, starting with Cupcake 2.0 and moving to Pie 9.0, its most recent release.

Android has ditched the dessert names for a more standard naming approach: numbers. The newest release has been dubbed Android 10. Google made the move from desserts to digits to mitigate any global confusion regarding the order of its operating systems. For people in places that do not use the alphabet or are unfamiliar with American desserts, naming in this way was not helpful.

As the chart below shows, Android’s operating system environment is still fractured. By July 2019—only about a month before the newest release of Android 10—about 38 percent of pageviews collected by StatCounter were using Pie 9.0, the most recent OS. About a fifth of pageviews in StatCounter’s network were still using Oreo 8.0, at that point that OS had been updated twice. Though Nougat 7.0 was released over three years ago, over ten percent of pageviews still came from operating systems using that software.