Only 3% Android Devices Are Running on Lollipop

Reports claim that the Lollipop is not yet fully encrypted by default on third party devices

Being latest doesn’t necessarily mean that its adoption rate is going to be higher; it all depends on what people come to love and prefer. As suggested by the most recent finds, Lollipop, the latest version of the Android OS, is only running on 3 percent of the total Android devices. This piece of information comes from the most recent Android Developer data which shows only 3.3 percent of the Android devices have the Lollipop installed on them.

As compared to this, at a whopping 42.6 percent, the Jelly Bean with both its versions 4.1 and 4.3 appears to be the most popular and it is almost at par with the 2013 KitKat at 40.9 percent. We might consider Gingerbread and Ice Cream Sandwich to be obsolete by now but they are way ahead of the latest Lollipop at 6.9 percent and 5.9 percent, respectively.

However, we would suggest that those still running the IceCream Sandwich should consider an update as Google has announced that Chrome’s 42nd Android release is going to be its last for the IceCream Sandwich. But those who really have a thing for the IceCream Sandwich can continue to use it but they will no longer get any updates.

Software engineer, Aurimas Lutikas, took to a blog post and said “Developing new features on older phones has become increasingly challenging, and supporting ICS takes time away from building new experiences on the devices owned by the vast majority of our users.”

There are some important considerations to make before we can judge the adoption rate for Lollipop. We have been hearing reports claiming that Android’s latest version is not yet fully encrypted by default and last year in September Google announced that Lollipop’s “encryption will be enabled by default out of the box, so you want even have to think about turning it on.”

However, from what we have heard through the Ars Technica, default encryption is only found on the Nexus 6 smartphone and Nexus 9 tablet but it is missing from the third-party devices such as the Moto E and Samsung Galaxy S6.

Google has now commented on the situation after a slight delay stating that “Due to performance issues on some Android partner devices we are not yet at encryption by default on every new Lollipop device. We remain firmly committed to encryption because it helps keep users safe and secure on the Web.”