Google: KitKat is now on 33.9% of Android devices

Even though KitKat has become merely a chocolaty residue over in Mountain View, for a large chunk of users it’s still their defacto OS build. Literally. Thanks to new data provided by Google itself, the Nestlé wafer is quite a popular product indeed, at least as far as Android goes. 4.4 is now sitting comfortably at 33.9% of all device traffic to the Play Store. Take a look:

This is very refreshing information given that many OEMs are slow to provide updates, if they bother at all. On the other hand, given the explosion in budget priced phones in the past year, as well as the success of companies like Xiaomi, it’s equally possible that there were simply more new phones made with KitKat pre-installed rather than suggesting existing phones were in fact, updated. While this data includes tablets as well, given their lesser popularity, one might be correct in assuming the majority of traffic was generated by phones.

It is also only fair to mention that Google has collected this data based on visitors to the Play Store over a seven day period (ending December 1st) and thus should a large chunk of people running older OS variants simply not have accessed the official marketplace, the numbers would be somewhat different if they had. Whatever the case may be, at the end of the day those are some very respectable numbers.

Now let’s see where Lollipop is three months from now!