Android O, the latest version of the world’s most popular mobile operating system is scheduled to be released today. While the release of a new Android version certainly is a big deal considering that there are more than 2 billion active Android devices, it is not as much of a game changer for developers as a new iOS release is for Apple’s mobile platform.
By its nature, Android has and probably always will be much more fragmented than iOS, which is owed to the fact that it runs on devices from countless different manufacturers. Apple on the other hand only has to make sure that iOS runs smoothly on a handful of its own devices. As our chart illustrates, only 13.5 percent of Android devices currently run Nougat, the latest version which was initially released in August 2016. By contrast, nearly 90 percent of iOS devices run some version of iOS 10, which was released in September 2016.
