Unusual source reveals unofficial Android distribution numbers for 2019

Remember the old days when early each month Google would release a breakdown of Android distribution? Seven months elapsed before Google posted updated figures in May of this year, and since then we have not seen any further updates. It isn't hard to understand why Google wouldn't want to publicize these stats. Because there are so many different Android phone manufacturers, the platform suffers from fragmentation. In other words, unlike iOS the same company does not develop the software and design the phone (except for the Pixel handsets which explains why they are always first in line to receive updates).

So if you look at the last official distribution chart from back in May, you see that the latest version of Android at that time, Pie, was found on just 10.4% of Android devices after eight months. And the sad thing is that the figure represented a 150% improvement over the percentage that had adopted Android Oreo at the same point during the previous year. Since the release of Android 10 in early September, we have received no official word on the percentage of Android devices that are running the new build.

However, an unusual source has published distribution numbers of its own, and while not as telling as surveying the number of Android devices that enter the Google Play Store on a given day, this information might give us the lay of the land as far as Android distribution is concerned. PornHub recently released its 2019 Year in Review and included some information that you might find interesting (we only visit the site for the articles). First of all, the majority of PornHub's traffic (76.6%) came from a handset this year and such traffic rose 7% in 2019. Despite Android smartphones owning approximately 85% of the global market, the majority of mobile PornHub users (52.8%) are viewing the streaming content over a device powered by iOS. 46.6% are fogging up the display on an Android phone or tablet. Interestingly, the number of iOS and Android users diverged over the year with a gain of 19% and a drop of 14% respectively. Part of the overall discrepancy might be due to the domination of iOS when it comes to the global tablet market.

For the year, the majority of Android users visiting PornHub used Android 9 Pie (48%) which is what you would expect since it was the latest official Android build for nine months out of the year. Android 8 Oreo was next (23%). Android 10, which started as the Android Q beta in March, was used on only 2% of Android devices that found their way to PornHub this year. That is less than the 12% that visited the site on a phone or tablet running Android 7 Nougat (from 2016), the 8% running on Android 6 Marshmallow (2015) and the 5% driven by Android 5 Lollipop (2014). As PornHub notes, 17% of its Android visitors are using a version of the operating system that is more than four years old. When you combine the numbers for Android 9 and 10, it reveals that only half of PornHub visitors had the latest version of Android on their device during 2019.

Compare those numbers with the 71% of iOS users that viewed PornHub content on a mobile device running iOS 13. That version of Apple's mobile operating system was released about two weeks after Google dropped Android 10. And 95% of iOS users were rocking the latest build of the operating system when they visited PornHub last year.

Many consider the Samsung Internet Browser to be the best for Android users (we do use it as the default browser on our Pixel 2 XL) and it had the highest year-over-year increase in usage among PornHub users. The browser had a 28% increase for the year but finished in third place after Chrome (44.3%) and Safari (41.6%). Those two had increases of 8% and 4% respectively for 2019.

Keep in mind that PornHub's data comes from a pool of users that is quite narrow, although the data is more confirmation that when it comes to updates, Google still has more work ahead of it.