Coming off the news that Apple's latest operating system, iOS 7, is now up and running on more than 78 percent of active iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch devices, the numbers for Google's Android operating system are out. The new Android 4.4 KitKat makes up just 1.4 percent of devices while the previous version, Android 4.3 Jelly Bean, continues to dominate with almost 60 percent of the entire Android Market.
According to TheInquirer, which cites Google's Android developer's portal for the statistics, Android fragmentation is apparently still a rapid problem, despite the firm contending that the problem is improving.
Android 4.4 KitKat was released back in November and has seen just a 0.3 percent increase compared to December's numbers. Comparing these numbers to the growth of Apple is a little unfair since the iOS 7 rollout happened across all of the company's mobile devices all at once. By contrast, one could argue that Google is not yet finished rolling out Android 4.4 KitKat. The mobile operating system is limited to devices like the Nexus 5 and 2013 Nexus 7 tablet. More recently it came out for the Moto G. However, firms like Sony and Samsung have not yet begun to make Android 4.4 available to their existing smartphone lineups.
As a result of the slow rollout, Android 4.3 Jelly Bean continues to dominate the Android market. So far the previous system for the Android operating system is running on roughly 59.1 percent of all Android smartphones and tablets.
The Jelly Bean os has had a lot of incarnations, but the latest one remains the most popular, making up 35.9 percent of that 59.1 percent of users. The generation before that accounts for 15.4 and 7.8 before that.
Android Gingerbread is still on a significant portion of Android devices still running on 21.2 percent of smartphones and tablets. The same can't be said for Android Honeycomb, which has seen its market share shrink to just 0.1 percent. Android 2.2 Froyo market share is also on the down slop, with just 1.3 percent of the share.
