Android statistics: April 2018

Some time ago I started to share Android statistics and predictions and I still keep track of these statistics. At my previous employer I also had to report on this, so I created some blogposts on their website instead of here. So I thought it might be interesting to start sharing this information again. I'll share my reasons to support or skip a certain version on the long and short term. Obviously the support you want to give for your app/website is depending on your customers and not per see on these statistics. 
https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/
Data collected during a 7-day period ending on April 16, 2018. 
Any versions with less than 0.1% distribution are not shown.

Statistics

I'm skipping the numbers for Android Jelly Bean and earlier (4.3 and earlier). The reason I left these out is due to the fact that there market share really does not matter anymore. And there are so many lines in these graphs that it is more clear this way. In case your app/website still needs to supports these versions, just take a look at the Android Developer Dashboard page for the latest numbers. All numbers shown in the figures below are collected from that same Android Developer Dashboard page.

Versions over time

Codenames over time

Support or not?

General trends

  1. New Android versions take about one to two months after release before we see them appearing in the statistics
  2. It takes at least 6 months after first appearance in the statistics to gain +- 5% market share
  3. For each codename, from the point it has 5% to the point it's on the #1 position takes about 1 year
  4. It can take up to a year after the version/codename has reached it's full potential before it starts to show a steady decrease in market share
  5. Steady decreasing versions will loose +- 10% market share per year
  6. Decreasing versions that have reached the 10% market share line will loose +-5% in the following year

Short term

If your project needs to go live in the next few months, it would make sense to support the Android 5.1.x and high. I would leave out 5.0 since it has a low market share unless it's not much effort. Android 4.4 depends on the scope of your project. It has a decent 10,5% but it's outdated (released in 2013). Android Oreo (8.0 & 8.1) depends on the scope of the project. My personal preferrence is to support the latest and these two versions definatelly will gain more market share in the next few months.

Long term

If your project will go live in about a year or so, I have almost the same recommendations besides the fact that I would definatelly drop 4.4 & 5.0 and most likely also 5.1 depending on how fast the market share drops.

Final words

Every project is different, every budget is different, every customer is different. Also there is a huge difference between apps versus mobile site. Listen to the customers, aim for the future and don't forget to meassure and test properly before release. If you didn't test, you don't know.
Location: Leiden, Netherlands

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

PowerShell - How to overcome Azure VM's fixed resolution limitation

Image
Intro This is the first in a series of PowerShell blogposts. I don't know a lot of PowerShell so I'm going to cover this part very short. What is PowerShell? PowerShell is a very powerful framework you can use to automate tasks. For more info, use Google or check the Wiki:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerShell For my current project we use Azure VM's that we use as selenium-grid (hub and nodes). And Visual Studio Online for kicking off builds. So I started to use a fair share of PowerShell in my test automation process. During the setup I came accross a couple of problems that I want to share with you all which I'll spread across a couple of posts. And we start with Azure VM's that have a fixed resolution of 1024 x 768 and how to overcome this issue/limitation. Azure VM's resolution limitation  Let's start with the problem we faced. Our website under test, requires the test machine to have at least a certain resolution ( Which is > 1024
Read more

TA Basics: Website Test Automation on mobile devices via Appium server

Image
Recently I have been focussing on test automation with mobile devices. Specifically Android and iOS (no Windows phone because that platform is as good as dead at the moment). I first wanted to make a complete manual from setting up software and devices/simulators up to a small test script. But due to lack of time I'll focus on specific parts. If you have any questions reguarding the setup, feel free to contact me. So all that said, let's get to the point. The internet is full of blogposts, video's and examples of people testing mobile apps. However I don't test an app, I want to do some web test automation on mobile devices. It took me quiet some time to figure out what exactly I had to use to get it all to work as needed for my project. Setup Mac mini running OSX 10.13.4 High Sierra (Mac machine is needed for iOS simulation) Ruby version 2.5.0p0 (2017-12-25 revision 61468) [x86_64-darwin17] Appium desktop version 1.4.1 (with Appium server 1.7.2) lapis_laz
Read more

TA: Who doesn't like proxies? Me!

Image
Are you on a company network that is using a proxy to connect to the internet? And do you want (or are you planning) to connect your tests to an external selenium-grid. Than stay tuned, before you get lost in a bunch of answers on the internet that don't resolve the issue you're facing. Source:  https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxyserver I'm on a new project and looking into Robotframework. But then I bumped into an issue with the POC I had to make which might result in me convincing the company to switch to Ruby. Anyway long story short. They use a proxy and although the internet has all the answers, you do need to know what specific question to ask to get the correct result. And since proxies are not used that much anymore, it's hard to find the skilled people to help you out and push you in the right direction for a solution. The setup To access the internet, I need a configuration on my computer that will tell Windows to connect to a proxy server. I
Read more