Comment by igravious | Hacker News Reader

Comment by igravious | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

According† to https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html

    The recent Marshmallow has 15.2% market share

    Lollipop (14.1% + 21.4%) = 35.5% (the greatest share)

    KitKat has 29.2% (the next greatest share)

    Jelly Bean† still has (6.0% + 8.3% + 2.4%) = 16.7%

Earlier than Jelly Bean is 3.4% of the total share. Jelly Bean was first unveiled in June 2012, four years ago. I think given the development model: large ecosystem of hardware companies, alternative software stacks like Kindle and Cyanogen, a good chunk of it being open-source; given all that I'll forgive Google that we all can't upgrade to Nougat on the day of its release.

As a techie you have to know by now that if you want an up to date version of Android you ought to get a Nexus or a brand which has guaranteed frequent into the future updates. There's not much point in claiming that you're "stuck" at this point.

† Data collected during a 7-day period ending on August 1, 2016.

> As a techie you have to know by now that if you want an up to date version of Android you ought to get a Nexus

Not true. I have bought: Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 7, Nexus 10, Nexus 5. Two of those were as expensive as iOS devices. None of them can get the N update (yes I could use Cyanogenmod but I prefer production versions of software for testing). We have our own app for Android phones and it is a pain to test (simulating touch with a mouse is not good). Other Android devices purchased for testing are no better...

Meanwhile the work iPhone 4 made it to iOS 7, the iPad 2 made it as far as iOS 9, and our other test devices are still getting updates to iOS 10.

I feel that Nexus devices stop getting updates quickly. The non-nexus Androids are way worse.

Don't buy an Android if you want a device to stay secure more than say two years (coming from somebody who loves Android!).

Thanks for the stats!

> As a techie you have to know by now that if you want an up to date version of Android you ought to get a Nexus...

Except I did that and it looks like my Nexus 7 is no longer getting OS updates, while my older iPhone 5 is still chugging on the latest OS and afaik will get iOS 10 soon.

This will definitely dissuade me from buying Android in the future.

We decided to build our own dashboard since Google's is updated only about once a month. It also doesn't include data from non Google Play devices:

https://data.apteligent.com/android/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com