Last month, it looks like Android KitKat was starting to move up in the ladder and it looks like even more growth has happened in April, with KitKat 4.4 stepping up to 8.5 percent market share on Android.
This is still lower than Gingerbread, all three Jelly Bean versions and Ice Cream Sandwich, but shows good progress in just a month for Android KitKat, which was lower than 5 percent March.
Android KitKat has pushed this far due to the HTC One (M8) and Galaxy S5 both getting officially released, running Android 4.4. Motorola and Samsung have also been updating their devices to Android KitKat in the past few months.
Jelly Bean 4.1 still has the most usage share on Android at 33 percent and this does appear to be going down too quickly. Gingerbread and Jelly Bean 4.2 sit a little further behind, at 16 and 18 percent respectively. It looks like Gingerbread is slowly dying, with only the cheapest devices still running the age old version.
Ice Cream Sandwich still has 13 percent market share surprisingly, this looks like another Froyo, the version before the big surge. Jelly Bean 4.3 holds the same amount of usage as Android KitKat, although 4.3 is dying out while KitKat continues to grow.
In the past two years, Google has adopted the iterative update every few months strategy, instead of adding a new version every year. Honeycomb may a curse to Google, forcing them to make small mistakes rather than large ones that last over a year.
This year, we may see Project Hera come onto Android, offering new Web functionality and multitasking that includes Webpages opened on other devices using Google Chrome, along with changes to Google apps UI.
Google Now should be a big focus of 2014 on Android as well, considering Android Wear’s functionality works around the voice recognition and virtual assistant service. We should see added functionality on Google Now in the next few months, adding more cards and features.
