Nobody’s Using Android 5.0 Lollipop…Almost

To be typical and tight-faced about it, nobody’s using Google’s latest mobile operating system update. Well, this might come as a little surprise considered that Lollipop is Google’s most ambitious output on the mobile OS scene yet. Based on the company’s latest stats and numbers delivered to Business Insider by BI Intelligence, less than 0.1% of all devices running Android are riding on Lollipop. This means it doesn’t even qualify to show on any market distribution charts, as most of them don’t feature in distributions with a score of less than 0.1%.According to the BI Intelligence report, most of Andy’s folks are still comfortable with Android Jelly Bean (46% of devices), followed by Android 4.4 KitKat (39.1%). Other than Lollipop, KitKat is the most recent version of Android. The other percentage is taken by extensive Android fragmentation. Android suffers from a rather complex problem known as fragmentation. This means that many different versions of the software are out and running on devices from different manufacturers at the same time. The root of this condition is the fact that Google gives third party smartphone manufacturers and hardware makers and carriers lots of leeway on what they could do with the platform. Thus, it’s typically difficult to roll out new updates, as each software version has to go through so many different channels before it can present before end users.Unfortunately, this makes things pretty tough for developers trying to engineer Android apps. Essentially, what version do they build an app for? While many have campaigned against this problem, Google still has a lot of good reason to allow this kind of fragmentation.  And the flexibility it yields forth is just one of the reasons why Android as a platform is so widespread.As we move forward, let’s see how Android Lollipop plays out on the field.