Despite its multiple efforts and several strategy changes, Google cannot end the perverse carnival of fragmentation in which Android is trapped. Version 7.0 Nougat was released in August of last year, while the first update 7.1 made its appearance in early December. The Android Developers portal published the new official adoption numbers, revealing that Android 7.1 barely has a distribution of 0.2 percent, thus establishing 0.7 percent for the total of Nougat.
Each manufacturer and provider is supposed to adapt Android to their products. The theory is good, but in practice we must admit it is a disaster. Instead of taking responsibility and maintaining their builds properly, manufacturers and providers alike have caused a fragmentation chaos, which in turn allowed them to feed their desires for planned obsolescence, retiring solid products early simply because they refuse to release updates. And as expected, Google received a large share of the shrapnel, first for allowing this to happen, and then for not developing a direct update mechanism (a Windows Update for Android, let's say) to protect devices.
The consequences are reflected in the official distribution numbers published by the Android Developers portal. The percentages cover the first nine days of January, and we discover that Android 6.0 Marshmallow is the most used version with 29.6 percent. In second place is 5.1 Lollipop with 23.3 percent, and the podium is closed by 4.4 KitKat with 22.6 percent. From a technical point of view, both Lollipop and KitKat were discontinued, but security issues cause the AOSP project to continue creating hotfixes that very few implement (an exception to the rule is Amazon Fire OS, based on Lollipop).
Now, if we focus on Android Nougat, there is no doubt that its adoption process is very slow. With almost five months on the market, the total rises to 0.7 percent, split into 0.5 percent for Nougat 7.0 and a negligible 0.2 percent for Nougat 7.1. I say negligible because records of 0.1 percent and below do not appear in the chart, a zone where Android 2.2 Froyo finally fell. Gingerbread, Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean still have some life left, as they represent 13.7 percent of Android distribution.
