• this is how Android has been forever. Jellybean was the most popular until around Nougat.

    People keeping their phones for a longer time shouldn’t be considered a bad thing. Cheap brands using old versions isn’t good though and that does represent some of the numbers.

    • I feel like at this point Google should ditch the annual OS level-up. Phones and their OSs have matured and pushing out a new version every year is just increasing the support Google has to provide without much benefit. I was running Android 9 until recently, and while I’m now on the 14 beta, I could easily see my current phone lasting long enough to outlive the current 5 years of security updates promised.

      • I haven’t been keeping up with the updates since they stopped naming them after food. I guess that worked. The numbers have gotten less important and less big changes. I think that’s probably best. just do updates that are needed, etc

      • But they’re doing security related updates. For example, in Android 11+ there’s app storage isolation, no app can access the shared storage without permission from the user. Just for those kind of update I think updates are important.