0
0
Android 10 only affects 8.2% of smartphones, and that’s still not enough.
From February 1, 2020, manufacturers are required to install version 10 of the operating system on all new Android smartphones. Google’s goal is fairly clear: to speed up the updating of the operating system by manufacturers. Compared to iOS, which has a “replacement” rate of almost 70% within a month of a major update release, the situation with Android is completely different.
Manufacturers are very slow to adapt their interface to new operating system versions (which are usually released annually between late August and early September): you have to wait at least a few months. Along with the new rules requiring Android 10 to be installed on all new smartphones due out from February 2020, Google hoped to accelerate development by manufacturers, but the numbers do not seem to confirm the Mountain View company. According to official data published by Google itself, only 8.2% of smartphones currently have Android 10 installed. This is frankly a very low number: manufacturers still do not adapt their interfaces to the new operating system, and the Covid-19 explosion has only slowed the process down even further.
Android 10 mandatory: numbers prove Google wrong
In previous years, Google gave manufacturers at least twelve months to force them to use the latest version of the operating system on their devices. Since Android 10, the rules have changed: five months of adaptation, and then, on February 1, the obligation to release only smartphones with the latest version of the operating system. Google hoped this would give manufacturers more time to develop software for models released in previous years as well.
Unfortunately, official figures believe Google’s strategy. At the moment, only 8.2% of devices have been updated to Android 10, which is quite a low percentage, especially compared to iOS 13, which is currently present on over 70% of Apple devices. Looking at the Android data, things aren’t much better for the older versions: Android 9.0 has 31.3% absorption and Android 8.1 Oreo 21.3%. 4% of users still use smartphones with Android 4.0 KitKat, which was released in 2013.
Android 10 requirement: problem never resolved
The problem of the prevalence of the latest versions of the Android operating system is an atavistic problem that Google has never been able to solve. With the mandatory installation of Android 10 from February 1, 2020, the company from Mountain View counted on accelerating the release of updates for older models. However, this did not happen, and the reason is quite simple: updating several-year-old smartphones to the latest version of Android is not only a huge investment for manufacturers, but also a risk: performance may drop and the smartphones will become useless.
Is there a solution to this problem? It is difficult to answer, especially in times that have made development work in large companies much more difficult.
