Global adoption of Android 10 the fastest of any version

Five months in and it was installed on 100 million devices.

Google has announced that Android 10 was installed on 100 million devices in the first five months of its release, making it the Android version with the fastest adoption rate yet. Those figures are 28 per cent faster than Android 9 Pie, and today Android 10 is on nearly 400 million devices.

Pushed out to Google Pixel phones in September 2019, Android 10 managed to make its way onto 100 million phones and tablets in 150 days. That’s significant for Android given that apart from Google, every manufacturer has to work like crazy to get its Android skin ready for release.

OnePlus and Sony have been historically good at this, but it’s the improvement of Samsung in this area that has perhaps contributed to the numbers considering how many Samsung phones are sold. The company started updating its S10 series with Android 10 in December 2019, quicker than in previous years.

Google attributes this relative success to Android Oreo’s Project Treble and now Android 10’s Project Mainline, initiatives that make it easier for Android OEMs to build their platform updates faster.

This amounts to good news for Android, but Google does not say what percentage of active Android devices are running Android 10, a figure it must have some idea of but is presumably not as impressive as the framing they’ve given the announcement.

And while it is sometimes unfair to compare Android to iOS given Apple controls every single iOS device out there, but Apple said that after 30 days of release that iOS 13 was on 55 per cent of compatible iPhones. This amounts to several times more devices than Google has managed.

But considering Android’s natural fragmentation, it’s a marked improvement.