It’s great news for Apple, as the majority of the company’s customers are staying on its most up-to-date software. The same can’t be said for Google’s Android mobile operating system, where only 1.2 percent of active devices run Android 7.0 Nougat or higher. Nougat was released towards the end of August 2016.
How do these stats compared to Nougat, the seventh major version of the Android operating system (codenamed Android N during development)? According to Google, Nougat (versions 7.0 – 7.1.2) was found on barely one percent of active devices based on data collected during a seven-day period ending on February 6, 2017.
Both Android Nougat and iOS 10 were released roughly around the same time.
The software update officially released on August 22, 2016, with Nexus devices being the first to receive it. The first developer-only beta of iOS 10 was released at WWDC 2016 on June 13, 2016 ahead of its public release on September 13, 2016.
Unlike with Android, Apple’s carrier partners don’t control how iOS software updates are distributed to consumers so the iPhone maker is able to release a new version of the mobile operating system to all active devices at once.
As a result, the three most recent versions of Android—Nougat, Marshmallow and Lollipop (which was released back in 2014)—lumped together are found on less than two-thirds of active Android devices that run the Google Play Store app (excluding devices that use third-party stores or don’t run Google services).
