Android Fragmentation Statistics 2026

Published September 13, 2026

Android fragmentation is the gap between the newest Android release and the devices people actually carry. This page collects the numbers that describe that gap in 2026: how many versions are in use, how fast new ones spread, who makes the devices, how long they get updates, and what Google Play now demands of apps. Every figure links to the organisation that produced it. Where a number is a sum or a count we made ourselves, the note beside it says so. Percentages in the text are rounded to one decimal; the source tables keep each publisher's own precision.

How many Android versions are in use in 2026?

Six Android versions each account for more than 5% of Android web traffic worldwide in August 2026, and the most used one, Android 16, holds only 25.8%. Android 15 follows at 16.9%, Android 13 at 14.8%, Android 14 at 13.1%, Android 12 at 10.1% and Android 11 at 8.3%. Android 10 and every older version together make up 10.0%. Android 17, released in June 2026, has 1.0%. The measure is StatCounter's, which counts page views from a tracking script on about 1.5 million websites, so a heavily used device counts more than a lightly used one. Google's own distribution, which counted devices that check in to Google Play, stopped updating on 1 December 2025. That final snapshot skews older than StatCounter: Android 16 at 7.4% and Android 9 or older at 9.2%. The two datasets measure different populations and are not combined anywhere on this page.

How long does a new Android version take to spread?

Android 14, 15 and 16 took four to seven months to reach 10% of Android web traffic and eight to thirteen months to reach 25%, and none reached 40%. Android 16 shipped on 10 June 2025, stood at 1.0% two months later, crossed 10% in December 2025 and 25% in July 2026. Android 15 shipped on 3 September 2024, reached 10% in April 2025 and 25% in July 2025, and peaked at 30.6% in September 2025 before Android 16 overtook it. Android 14 was the fastest and highest of the three: 10% by February 2024, 25% by June 2024, and a peak of 37.1% in January 2025. Android 17 shipped on 16 June 2026 and held 1.0% of traffic by August. Google now publishes AOSP source twice a year, in the second and fourth quarters.

How does Android version spread differ by region?

The share of Android devices on Android 16 is twice as high in North America as in Africa. Android 16 accounts for 38.5% of Android web traffic in North America, 28.3% in Europe, 23.0% in Asia and 19.5% in Africa in August 2026. The old tail inverts: Android 10 or older is 14.1% of traffic in Africa and 6.9% in North America. Android 15 also differs by region, at 19.4% in Asia against 10.5% in North America. Together, Android 15 and 16 generated 49.0% of measured Android traffic in North America and 33.8% in Africa. These are traffic shares, not the share of users a test on those two versions would cover.

How does Android fragmentation compare with iOS?

Android has six versions above 5% of use while iOS has two. On StatCounter's measure for August 2026, summing point releases into major versions, iOS 26 carries about 74.7% of iOS web traffic and iOS 18 about 15.7%, with nothing else above 2%. Apple's own count, taken on 7 June 2026 from iPhones that used the App Store, puts iOS 26 at 79% and iOS 18 at 14% and does not break down the remaining 7%. The two newest iOS majors therefore cover 90.4% of iOS traffic, while the two newest Android releases, 17 and 16, cover 26.8% of Android traffic on the same StatCounter basis. Apple's device count and StatCounter's traffic count are different measures and are kept apart in the table.

• 6Android versions above 5% of Android web trafficStatCounter, Aug 2026
• 2iOS major versions above 5% of iOS web trafficiOS 26 and 18. StatCounter, Aug 2026
• 26.8%of Android traffic on the two newest releasesAndroid 17 + 16. StatCounter, Aug 2026
• 90.4%of iOS traffic on the two newest major releasesiOS 26 + 18. StatCounter, Aug 2026

How much of the world runs Android?

Android carries 67.6% of mobile web traffic worldwide in August 2026 and took 75% of smartphone sales in the second quarter of 2026. StatCounter measures mobile page views; Counterpoint measures smartphone sales during one quarter. The share varies widely by country: 92.8% of mobile traffic in India, 82.0% in Nigeria, 77.1% in Indonesia, 75.5% in Brazil, 62.7% in Europe and 39.3% in the United States, the largest market where iOS leads. On tablets iOS is ahead worldwide at 52.3%. Google's latest published total of active Android devices is "more than 3 billion", from May 2021; the figures near 4 billion that circulate are third-party estimates. Shipments are falling: IDC forecasts a 16.7% drop in 2026 to just over a billion smartphones, concentrated in phones under $100 as memory prices rise.

Who makes Android devices, and how many models are there?

Five vendors ship 71% of the world's smartphones, and nobody has published a count of distinct Android models since 2015. Samsung led shipments in the second quarter of 2026 with 23%, ahead of Apple at 21%, Xiaomi at 11%, and vivo and OPPO at 8% each; Counterpoint puts every other brand at 27%, a rounded figure that does not list Transsion, Honor, Motorola or realme separately. The picture changes by country. In India the leading Android vendor by web traffic is vivo at 17.7%, followed by Xiaomi, realme, Samsung, OPPO and Motorola, none above 16%. In Africa StatCounter leaves 9.9% of mobile traffic unidentified. OpenSignal observed 24,093 distinct device models in its 2015 sample, the latest such count we could find; Google's Play Console device catalog is per app and states no total.

What hardware does an Android app have to support?

MediaTek supplied 31% of smartphone application processors shipped in the second quarter of 2026, with Qualcomm at 23%, UNISOC at 13% and Samsung at 9%; Apple's 19% is iPhones, so among non-Apple processors MediaTek and Qualcomm together supply about two thirds. Screens are similarly spread: the most common mobile resolution, 414 by 896 CSS pixels, accounts for 13.6% of all mobile web traffic, and the next three sizes are each under 10%. Android defines six density buckets from ldpi to xxxhdpi. Android Go still permits 2 GB of RAM on Android 13 and 1 GB on Android 12, and Google's latest count of Go devices, more than 250 million monthly active, dates from October 2022. Apps with native code must meet Google Play's 64-bit requirement, and Google's own benchmarks credit 16 KB memory pages with a 3.2% average improvement in app launch time under memory pressure and 4.6% less power at launch.

How long do Android devices get updates?

Published update commitments now run from two years to eight depending on the manufacturer and the model. Google gives Pixel 8 and later seven years of OS and security updates, Samsung promises the Galaxy S25 seven OS upgrades and seven years of patches, and Fairphone supports its Gen 6 until 2033. OnePlus's UK declaration for the Nord 5 specifies six years, while its company-wide statement commits to a minimum of three; Xiaomi's policy says at least two. Motorola publishes a stop date for every supported device, and across its 112 current models the median security window is 4.0 years, with one in ten under three. Since 20 June 2025 the EU requires five years of OS updates counted from the day the last unit is sold. Speed matters as much as length: Samsung's first stable Android 16 rollout came 97 days after Google's, and Android platform security fixes now reach AOSP quarterly.

What does Google Play require of apps in 2026?

From 31 August 2026 new phone and tablet apps and updates on Google Play must target Android 16 (API 36), and existing apps must target at least Android 15 (API 35) or lose availability to new users on newer Android versions. Google grants extensions to 1 November 2026 through the Play Console; Wear OS, TV, Automotive and XR have their own thresholds. The larger change is memory page size. Google announced in May 2025 that new apps and updates targeting Android 15 or later must support 16 KB pages from 1 November 2025; the current reference documentation sets 1 February 2027 as the date after which apps targeting API 35 or higher without 16 KB support cannot ship updates to 64-bit devices. Apps written only in Java or Kotlin already comply; native libraries, including ones pulled in by an SDK, must be 16 KB-compatible, which for many means a rebuild. From February 2027 Play also requires at least 25% code shrinking for apps with more than 10 MB of DEX code and games with more than 50 MB.

How stable are Android apps compared with iOS?

The median Android app in Luciq's 2024 customer data is crash-free in 99.80% of sessions, against 99.91% for the median iOS app. Embrace's 2023 customer data gives 99.81% and 99.93%: the two vendors' Android medians differ by 0.01 percentage points and their iOS medians by 0.02. The gap widens below the median. The 25th-percentile Android app is crash-free in 99.32% of sessions, so roughly a quarter of Android apps in Luciq's sample crash in more than 0.68% of sessions. Memory pressure is the sharpest difference: Embrace measured a low-memory warning in 12.9% of Android sessions and 5.5% of iOS sessions, rising to 26.0% for Android games. Luciq's median app records 2.62 application-not-responding errors and 1.12 out-of-memory errors per 10,000 sessions. These are the vendors' own instrumented customers and do not establish Play-wide rates. No vendor publishes crash rates by Android version.

• 99.80%median crash-free sessions, AndroidiOS 99.91%. Luciq, 2024 data
• 99.32%crash-free sessions at the 25th percentile, AndroidiOS 99.66%. Luciq, 2024 data
• 12.9%of the median Android app's sessions see a low-memory warningiOS 5.5%. Embrace, 2023
• 2.62ANR errors per 10,000 sessions, median appLuciq, 2024 data

How big is the Android testing surface?

Google's SDK repository offered 319 emulator system-image packages on 13 September 2026 (UTC), across 41 API-level identifiers and 21 device-type tags, with 38 images carrying the 16 KB page-size tag. Firebase Test Lab listed 205 Android device models the same day, 196 of them physical, in 272 model-and-version combinations between API 26 and 37. Both counts are ours, taken from Google's own tools, because Google publishes neither. The Android 16 Compatibility Definition Document contains 1,303 numbered requirements by our count; Google publishes no total and no count of Compatibility Test Suite cases. The emulator itself is getting heavier: an Android 17 virtual device now needs at least 4 GB of RAM, and the Windows hypervisor driver retires on 31 December 2026. Against that surface sit 1,985,023 apps on Google Play by AppBrain's count.

• 319emulator system images in Google's SDK repositorycounted 13 Sep 2026
• 205Android device models in Firebase Test Lab196 physical, 9 virtual
• 1,303numbered requirements in the Android 16 CDDcounted by us
• 4 GBminimum RAM for an Android 17 virtual deviceemulator 36.6.11

What do developers use to build Android apps?

Kotlin's adoption figure depends entirely on who is counted. JetBrains found 18% of all developers used Kotlin in the year to mid-2025, up from 2% in 2017, but only 8% call it their primary language; Stack Overflow's broader sample puts past-year use at 10.8%. Google says more than 60% of professional Android developers use Kotlin and that 95% of its top 1,000 Play Store apps contain Kotlin code, and that more than 68% of those apps use Jetpack Compose, up from 60% a year earlier. Cross-platform frameworks are a smaller group: 9.4% of developers did extensive Flutter work and 8.4% React Native work in Stack Overflow's 2024 survey, the last year it asked. Kotlin Multiplatform grew from 7% to 18% of developers in a year. No current developer survey we could find asks how many devices or Android versions teams test against.

How were these statistics selected?

Every row on this page links to the organisation that produced the number, not to an article that quoted it. StatCounter figures come from its CSV export retrieved on 12 September 2026; the live pages restate recent months by a few hundredths of a point as data settles. Sums are additions of the rows the source publishes. The Motorola median is computed from the launch and stop months Motorola prints for each of its 112 supported devices. The emulator, Test Lab and CDD counts are the number of packages, models and numbered requirement identifiers returned by Google's own tools and document on the stated date. Sources measure different things: StatCounter counts web page views, Google and Apple count devices that contact their stores, IDC and Counterpoint count shipments or sales, and crash vendors count their own customers' sessions. The text says which measure each figure uses. Figures are the latest available on 12 and 13 September 2026 and will be refreshed quarterly; the byline shows the date of the last revision.

Information was gathered and synthesized using AI agents.