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Google reveals that 10 percent of devices are using Android 9 Pie, nine months after its release

Google reveals that 10 percent of devices are using Android 9 Pie, nine months after its release

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The first numbers that Google has revealed for Android Pie since its launch

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Google has announced that 10.4 percent of the total Android install is running Android Pie, the latest version of the mobile OS that the company officially released last year on August 6th, 2018 (via Android Police). Today’s announcement marks the first time in the nine months since Google released Pie to the public that the company has given hard stats on what percent of devices have it installed.

Compared to last year, Google’s numbers are way up: as of May 2018, Android Oreo was only installed on 5.7 percent of Android devices, meaning that Pie (based on our limited dataset, at least) is being picked up twice as fast as the last version.

Twice the adoption rate as Oreo, but still far behind iOS

Oreo still makes up the largest percentage of Google’s current install base, though, with a combined 28.3 percent across Android 8.0 and 8.1, followed by Android Nougat at 19.2 percent (for versions 7.0 and 7.1 together), Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) at 16.9 percent, and Android Lollipop at 14.5 percent (counting 4.1 and 4.0 together). Pie — with 10.4 percent — comes in fifth place among Android versions.

While Google’s improvements in adoption rates are impressive, there’s still the elephant in the room to contend with: Apple’s iOS, which crushes Google when it comes to device adoption for recent updates due to Apple’s closed-loop control over both hardware and software that the vast majority of Android devices simply can’t match.

For comparison, iOS 12, Apple’s most recent update, took just 23 days to hit 50 percent of eligible iOS devices, a landmark that still appears to be a distant goal for even Google’s most popular Oreo OS right now. As of Apple’s latest update on February 24th, 80 percent of all devices are using Apple’s latest OS, with only 8 percent of the install base using software older than 2017’s iOS 11.

Hopefully, Google will have more frequent updates to its developer portal going forward. According to Android Police, the portal — which, prior to today, was last updated on October 26th, 2018 — has been out of commission for the last several months because Google lost its previous source of data, although the company is said to have since fixed the issue with a new data source.