AndroidCentral readers love them some Kit Kat
I love data and charts. Really love them, like totally nerd out over them. Last week, we put up a poll asking you which version of Android you were running. I knew I could use your answers and do something with them. Thus, the quarterly AC reader version charts were born. And this pretty chart that is totally a remix of Google’s.
For now, this is just for discussion purposes. We can compare it to December 2013 numbers from Google themselves and see a few things. The first, and biggest, is that we love our Kit Kat. I’m sure a larger percentage of our readers (compared to the general population) have one of the few phones or tablets running Android 4.4, and the number of people who said screw it, then rooted and did it themselves is going to be a much higher percentage than normal folks.
The second thing that jumps out at me here is the very low number of people running Gingerbread. Compared to Google’s 24.1 percent estimate, our 1.92 percent numbers tell me that most of us switch phones more often than usual, and the custom ROM factor is at play again.
The Jelly Bean numbers are much closer. Google comes up with 54.5 percent of the user base running Jelly Bean, while we show 42.31 percent. This is the core group of 2013’s “flagship” phones — the HTC One, The Galaxy phones (S3, S4, Note 2 and Note 3), LG’s Optimus G, Pro and G2 and others — that are running the carrier version. Folks who don’t want to root or ROM, and are happy with the way their device runs out-of-the-box.
Of course, like every other analyst out there, I could be completely off. This is what I see when I look at my pretty chart. And of course, the data could be skewed by folks who didn’t answer our poll or answered less-than-truthfully.
This is something we’re going to explore further. Look for quarterly polls about your Android version at a minimum, and as we geek out over the data we’ll share anything and everything we find that’s interesting. For now, let’s discuss what we see here in the comments.