Android 4.4 Surging

Earlier this week at Apple’s WorldWide Developer Conference, Tim Cook pointed out that the Android community can’t get its act together when it comes to software versions. He’s right that there are several editions of Android on phones around the world, although I’d argue it doesn’t matter that much since Google is upgrading its services across all of those versions. Besides, the KitKat upgrade train is coming on strong, up more than 25 percentage points in North America in the past three months.

The data comes from Chitika’s ad network where it last reported Android 4.4 adoption in April. At that time, only 10 percent of the phones browsing sites on its network in the U.S. and Canada ran KitKit. Fast forward to the current day and that figure is 37 percent, making KitKat usage second in North America only to Jelly Bean, the prior version of Android.