OEMs (and probably carriers) really need to get their stuff together. It really sucks that here we are talking about M when very few devices have seen an L release.
Cough, Touchwiz.
On my Note device, I've done everything I can to hide Touchwiz and go back to stock Lollipop because of how much better it is.
To everyone else it was an incremental update.
Don't blame Samsung for that, my Nexus 7 did that as well. And in Netflix the dialog appeared behind the active window so you couldn't see it or hit the button.
Lollipop's first release was a bit of a mess in terms of bugs (it has since gotten a lot better, at least on devices that have kept up with releases, like Nexus devices), but I'd still run a stock 5.0 release as a daily-use phone OS over any Touchwiz release ever.
I can't begin to describe how terrible I find the Touchwiz interface relative to stock.
The downside of having an open platform is that OEMs will add crap to differentiate themselves - just look at the weird media bs that comes pre-installed on tons of windows laptops.
I think Google knows that the status quo with Android is unsustainable and will need to migrate to a more tightly controlled business model. Samsung's flirting with Tizen hasn't paid off and they're more or less stuck with Google dictating policy now. The monthly security updates thing sounds promising as well. Its time Android got serious about security and updates.
Also, this lag is the reason they won't get rid of the Nexus program. Without it, they would not have a test bed for Android.
But I think it ends up more like enterprise IT where OS updates get put off and only done when absolutely necessary. To OEMs who only really care about selling hardware, it's just more testing, deployment, and support cost (not to mention porting their customizations).
I realize I'm not in the majority (outside of tech circles) but I really do like Android and the main criteria for choosing a device are specs, build quality, and likelihood of timely updates. My current phone is a Moto X and it's the first non-Nexus I've had in a while. And I only got that because I broke my Nexus 5 and we were still a way off from a refresh. The Moto seemed like a less extravagant (in terms of price and screen size) version of the Nexus 6. But if Lenovo undoes the good things Google did for Moto, I'll be back to the Nexus line regardless for my next phone. I got rid of the carrier as a middleman by avoiding carrier-branded and subsidized handsets but the OEM still plays a huge part as long as proprietary code is needed to port newer versions of the OS to a given device.
Based on https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html though, L is behind the pace :(
Which makes sense - what you linked is aggregate number of all users on the Play store across the world. Users that actually actively engage in their phones and western markets are noticably more up to date. Ignore newer API versions at your own peril.
Your post seem predicated on assumptions which aren't supported:
- That people with "better engagement" are more profitable to app developers (which might be the reverse of true if you aren't on a freemium modal). - That non-Westerners don't buy apps at all or that we simply shouldn't care. .
- For pretty much any of our apps the actual breakdown of Android versions is nothing like what the Play store shows. - The amount of new Androids is significantly higher (we actually have an app with 57% 5.x and 80% on 4.4 or newer - Samsung updates have been significant for it) and varies greatly - The users with newer devices and newer Android versions are usually more engaged, use apps more and also advertise them more which makes for a good network effect. - We have noticed a major shift to apps with Material design, arrogant Apple marketing aside, there's alot of users on Android that DO care about design, UX and those tend to have rather newish phones.
Depending on your app you should of course also care for people on worse phones. If you're providing a public service app (e.g. showing public transport schedules), you should probably target as low as 2.3 (even though, perhaps actually building 2 APKs for that usecase makes sense). If you're building a modern 3D game, you should probably target API 19+ since users with older devices probably won't be able to run it anyway. But in any case, DO YOUR RESEARCH, because the numbers vary greatly across demographics, app categories and regions.
2. As bad as Android adoption normally is, in general L adoption has been better or at least on par with that of previous versions. Check the last chart: http://www.bidouille.org/misc/androidcharts Lollipop release date is actually wrong there (makes the chart more optimistic), but by a month only.
[edit]
According to Sprint's website[1] 4.4.4 is the latest version.
1: http://support.sprint.com/support/article/Find-and-update-th...