Android 16 is off to a strong start in Google's latest usage breakdown

With as much as we focus on Google’s latest Android fixes and improvements, looking at feature drops, Beta and Canary releases, and always obsessing about what’s happening next, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that much of the world is still operating on some pretty ancient Android releases. Every once in a while, though, we get a reminder of what this landscape really looks like as Google shares its updated platform distribution statics. It’s been the better part of year since we last got some fresh numbers, and now Google is once again updating its breakdown.

Time was, these figures were publicly posted on Google’s dev pages, offering an easy peek at the current state of Android version adoption. Updates weren’t frequent, but at least the numbers were there. Then Google finally abandoned even this approach, and ever since it’s been hiding them within tools like Android Studio. 9to5Google just spotted that the numbers there have received an update, offering us a look at Android usage as sampled at the beginning of December.

Looking back to April of last year, when we previously got an update, there’s not a huge shift in usage trends across old Android versions. Our most current release is still picking up steam, while the five previous editions all still enjoy greater than 10% penetration. That said, there are some important distinctions worth noticing, and there’s a much closer running between the older releases here than we observed last time, when there was a >10% difference between Android 14 and 13.

We also see a notable shift in the uptake of our current release. Back in April, Android 15 was only in use on some 4.5% of devices. But here we’re already seeing Android 16 take hold of a much larger share, hitting 7.5% in just a few months.

Considering’s Google’s recent tweaks to Android’s release schedule, that kind of change makes a lot of sense — Android 15 arrived without a ton of momentum, and with Android 16 it feels like all parties involved are much more motivated to get updates out to devices.

Beyond just offering us some insight into how Android users are experiencing Google’s platform, this kind of information helps developers target users, making sure their apps can be used by the broadest segment possible. It’s still a bit of a bummer that we don’t see the numbers updated more often, but we’re always happy to see Google release a fresh set of data like this.