Android 4.4 KitKat reaches 8.5% adoption rate on Android smartphones

Adoption of Android 4.4 KitKat has steadily been increasing in recent months, going from 1.8 percent in February to 2.5 percent in March and then jumping to 5.3 percent in April. This month saw KitKat’s biggest growth yet, with the newest version of Android claiming nearly 1/10th of all devices. Google has updated its Android platform distribution stats, which surveys all devices that access the Play Store during a 7-day period ending on May 1. 

KitKat, the newest version of Google’s Android mobile operating system, continues to make slow and steady progress after reaching 8.5 percent adoption among Android smartphones and tablets that use the Google Play app store each month, according to the latest data from the search giant. Adoption of the seven-month-old software among “active” Android devices — as Google refers to them — is up from 5.3 percent at the beginning of April, but KitKat still sits in the shadow of Jelly Bean, its predecessor, which accounts for 60.8 percent across its three separate versions. The rate of Jelly Bean installations did drop slightly over the past month, however, having accounted for 61.4 percent in April.