About 32 million Android devices soon won't be able to run the latest versions of Chrome (Updated)

Update: A previous version of this article claimed Android devices running Jelly Bean would no longer be able to use Google’s Chrome browser, which is false. We regret the error and have updated this article.

Original article: The team over at XDA Developers did some digging through the most recent version of the Chrome Android app and found an interesting new commit. The commit leads us to believe that in the very near future, Chrome will no longer support Android devices running Jelly Bean.

Currently, Chrome can be installed from the Google Play Store on any device with Android 4.1 or newer. Soon though, only devices running Android 4.4 KitKat or newer will be supported.

What does this mean exactly? Devices running Android Jelly Bean will no longer be able to update the Chrome browser in the Google Play Store, but they can still access the Chrome browser. They’ll just be running an older version.

Although the overwhelming majority of Android devices run on KitKat or later, there are still plenty of devices on Jelly Bean. According to the most recent Android distribution numbers, 3.2 percent of Android devices are still on a version of Jelly Bean.

Since there are over one billion Android devices, 3.2 percent of a billion is 32 million devices.

There’s no timeline yet known for when Google is going to remove support for Jelly Bean devices in Chrome. Since there’s already a commit in the Chrome code it will most likely be fairly soon.