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AFTER LAUNCHING BACK in November, Android Lollipop has still yet to make a dent in the Android market as it slowly makes its way to devices.
The latest update is on less than 0.1% of devices with only the Nexus range having access to it since its launch. Samsung has begun rolling out the update to European users and will continue to do so over the next few weeks, and it’s expected that other manufacturers will soon follow suit.
While users continue to wait for its arrival, its predecessor has been doing well. KitKat is now on 39.1% of devices, a jump from 33.9% last month, while the three versions of Jelly Bean can be found on 46% of devices. Lollipop doesn’t even make the list since any versions with less than 0.1% distribution isn’t shown on the chart.
[image alt="Google Android Lollipop" src="http://cdn.thejournal.ie/media/2015/01/google-android-lollipop-630x261.jpg" width="630" height="261" title="" class="alignnone" /end]
The reason for this comes down to the lack of phones that can upgrade to it and the sheer number of devices and manufacturers that use Android.
Whenever an update is announced, it takes a significant amount of time for each manufacturer to make the necessary changes to Android before release. Combine that with the vast range of low-, mid-, and high-end devices out there, and the entire Android ecosystem becomes fragmented as the chart above shows.
Lollipop is one of the most significant updates Android has received both in style and functionality. It uses a new look called Material Design which makes graphics appear flatter, like paper and ink, and uses bold colours as well as shadows and depth to complete the effect.
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Have been using it on my nexus 5 since it came out. Works fine. Notifications are handled better and am getting slightly better battery life.
Does showbox work with lollipop
Not on mine anyway. Pain in the arse
I’ve noticed its considerably slower than before on my version 1 nexus7
Same for me too actually. Logged a Google bug report but nothing back yet
When is it coming to the 3310?
It completely wrecked my Nexus 7 tablet. Had to factory reset and disable a bunch of graphics and app settings to regain functionality. Read the Google forums for your phone or tablet before you update!!!
I think that it only negatively affected the 2012 version of the Nexus 7 and there’s a patched version available now.
I’ve had Lollipop on my Nexus 4 since November and I think it’s great.
Do you not find your nexus 4 keeps randomly turning off since the update?
Nope – it’s worked fine. My wife has it on hers also with no problems.
Great update on nexus 4, but I did find it would shut off randomly and certain apps such as Facebook would stop responding quite often. Absolutely no change to the battery life, still find it shockingly bad in the nexus.
Same with me but the 5.0.2 update earlier this week fixed it. Its flying now!
Looking forward to it apparently gives a huge performance boost for the Galaxy Note 3.
Less than 0.1% of Android devices
Thats about 1 million devices.
Not to make his a fanboy argument, but this is why iOS & apple is so popular. It’ll only not work on the oldest of devices. Everything is manufactured by the one company, so there’s no variations in hardware to account for.
Last I heard iOS 8 was on 50% of devices within a week of release and is now circa 70%, with over 20% on iOS 7 & older devices making up the balance.
Akin to a “No offence but… *causes offence*” statement :)
If Android Manufacturers used the default OS, they would probably have more phones upgraded to this software regularly. They don’t unfortunately. But with the Material UI, I believe they might be trying to unite the Manufacturers for this very reason.
I’ve recently switched to a Nexus, and find it great. Previously had a Samsung which was slow to get updates. And their software was laggy on occasion.
Ahhhhh not really. The latest ios had many problems at launch and let’s not forget the apple maps failure
Was offered it almost immediately on my Nexus.
It took 2 more months of declining the update for the prompt to disappear.
No issue with android, for me its the apps.
Update android & you have to update the apps…. Sometimes updates are worse than the original, so I’m happy to stay put.
Ah stop lad.
Great news.
Ruined my nexus…..apps crash, takes twice as long to charge, turns itself off. Please read up on it before you download
Meanwhile Apple’s latest iOS version (iOS 8) is on 68% of all active iOS devices.
Another pointless dogmatic article. The self-important narcissists are more concerned about trivial things, just look at the view counts – this article has 3911 views at the time of writing and the “Nurses from Beaumont ……….” have 1911 views.
It’s true what they say…”Money can’t buy you logic”
I bet you’re great craic altogether.
I have android 4.4.2 on my Samsung S4 that is rooted and it was installed via program on pc.
Will I be able to update it to lollipop when it is available or will I have to install it manually?
Sounds like you’ll have to beat it in with a hammer.
Best of luck with it.
You can indeed install the update :) You can download and install the Google Edition of Lollipop from http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2557353 , as long as you have root – I have it installed a while now and love it! No issues at all – everything works.
Just be aware that you lose the Samsung UI and will have the default Google edition, there’s a lot of extra little subtleties which you will likely miss. I found it lacking in options and settings features which I use regularly gone when I went to tried stock 4.4.3 before Xmass, I ended going back to 4.4.2 and just put up with the poorer battery management. I should also mention it’s harder to find i9505 network roms online to revert back to, there were 2 variants for 3 and one of them has a kernel which only gave me Edge and 4G, no option for HSPA. Took me 4 hrs to dl the correct one from only one link I could find at 40kb/s. Just a few things to keep in mind, that and I doubt Samsung will release 4.4.3 or higher for the S4 at this stage so it’s weighted decision.
The connectivity that one receives with a given rom is most likely down to the modem that you have installed. You can download different modems online for your device before ever rooting so that you can revert easily. Random reboots is also often caused by an incorrect modem installed.
Running 5.0.2 on my old sgs2. Very happy
You can run lollipop on your sgs4 today.
Still waiting on it for my onePlus. Only Google devices got it, and other phone developers take 3 months to adapt it for each hardware device. Alpha builds are available, but it’s like windows 98 with their driver problems all over again. All down to Google not providing a proper separation between kernel and OS that results in small numbers of upgrades. But then again, maybe android users are happy with what they have.
Still no sign on my Moto G play edition.
“All down to Google not providing a proper separation between kernel and OS that results in small numbers of upgrades.”
That’s not for Google to deal with nor their fault, nor maintain, support.
That is the manufacturer’s decision on whether to support it, case in point, look at the Samsung Galaxy variants, one type for Asia which is CDMA, one type for Europe GSM, one type for USA, LTE/GSM, along with minor differences in the chipset itself.
Far too many different types of screen sizes, processors, radio technologies, cameras, list goes on.
Some drivers are proprietary, others are open source, hence why some manufacturers are unwilling to support it, or release binaries to enable some ROM developers to build a new version
So that statement you provided is entirely misleading.
The Oneplus One uses CyanogenMod, the new version of CM based on Lollipop will be out early next month.
Quinton. What does mean for the ordinary person with a Samsung !!
Not available on galaxy s3 I am still on 4.3 version
I installed it on my Nexus 5 and Nexus 7. Had to wipe the cache partition as my battery life dropped significantly. After that though it started working great.
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