Android 13 Is on 5.2% of Devices After 5 Months, Which Is Better Than It Sounds

Google released Android 13 in the fall of 2022, so most people still don’t have it. How many do, though? We finally have some idea now that Google has released updated Android device distribution numbers. So far, 5.2% of the world’s Android devices are running on Android 13. Although that may not sound like a lot, this represents an improvement over the way things used to be.

Until a few years ago, Google would provide monthly updates on Android device distribution on its developer portal. It included not only Android versions, but also the proportion of devices of various sizes, screen DPI, and more. It was a tool aimed at helping app developers target the phones and tablets people were using. However, more often than not, it gave critics ammunition to (rightly) complain about the slow pace of Android updates. Google stopped updating that page and now only provides periodic updates in the Android Studio developer tools.

According to 9to5Google, The new update is the first one since August 2022, just before the release of Android 13. In the last five months, Android 13 has made it to 5.2% of devices, including those from Samsung, OnePlus, Sony, and, naturally, Google. The slightly older Android 12 and 12L also increased their usage share from 13.5% to 18.9%. Overall, about half of all Android devices are running Android 11 or higher.

These numbers show an accelerating pickup for Google’s new platform versions. If you look back at stats from the era of Android KitKat and Lollipop, the latest version would only have a fraction of this usage share after half a year. That’s because the only phones running the new software would be Google’s Nexus phones, plus maybe one or two new devices from OEMs that worked with Google to deploy the latest software as a marketing gimmick.

The improvements are thanks largely to structural changes in how Android is developed and deployed. For example, Project Treble was launched in 2017 to re-architect the platform, separating the OS framework from the low-level vendor code. This made it easier to update devices without waiting on vendors to provide updated drivers. We saw evidence of improvement that very year, and it’s gotten better ever since.

No matter how improved things are, there are still some dangerously outdated devices in the wild. There are still 2.1% of Android devices running Lollipop, which launched in 2015 with the very first Material overhaul. And 0.7% of devices still run KitKat, which hasn’t seen a security patch in ages. If you are one of these people, it’s time for an upgrade.

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