Android phone makers and carriers are filling up more devices with KitKat. Lollipop? Not so much.In its latest Android Developers Dashboard posted earlier this week, Google revealed a 39.1 percent market share for Android 4.4 KitKat. Specifically, that percentage reflects the Android devices that visited the Google Play store during the seven days ending January 5."">Launched in October 2013, KitKat has been climbing the charts lately. The 39.1 percent share showed a steady rise from 33.9 percent a month ago, 30.2 percent the prior month and 25 percentin early September.That's good news for people craving KitKat. But what about Android users who want a taste of Lollipop, the latest version of Google's mobile OS? Google has promoted Lollipop with a brand new design concept known as Material that offers animations and other visual effects. But where is it?Lollipop, aka Android 5.0, doesn't even appear on the developer dashboard. The page specifically says that "any versions with less than 0.1 percent distribution are not shown," which means that Lollipop's share is below that. In contrast, KitKat snared a 1.1 percent share during its first month, according to ZDNet. Lollipop was released on November 3, so it's been in the wind for a little more than two months. That should have given it enough time to score more than a 0.1 percent share by this point. So what's been happening?
Some device makers have already rolled out Android 5.0. LG and Motorola have been spreading it to certain of their key devices.Samsung has begun pushing it out in certain regions but not in the US yet. Sony has promised to kick off Lollipop to Xperia devices starting early 2015.Google had started deploying the latest OS to some of its Nexus devices in November. But the rollout doesn't seem to be hitting enough people at this point. For example, I have a Nexus 7 2013tablet, and I'm still running KitKat 4.4.4. Google has also been forced to resolve some technical issues in Android 5.0 running on Nexus devices, prompting it to release Android 5.0.1 and Android 5.0.2.But perhaps the biggest problem rests with the whole Android OS distribution process. 
Some device makers have already rolled out Android 5.0. LG and Motorola have been spreading it to certain of their key devices.Samsung has begun pushing it out in certain regions but not in the US yet. Sony has promised to kick off Lollipop to Xperia devices starting early 2015.Google had started deploying the latest OS to some of its Nexus devices in November. But the rollout doesn't seem to be hitting enough people at this point. For example, I have a Nexus 7 2013tablet, and I'm still running KitKat 4.4.4. Google has also been forced to resolve some technical issues in Android 5.0 running on Nexus devices, prompting it to release Android 5.0.1 and Android 5.0.2.But perhaps the biggest problem rests with the whole Android OS distribution process.
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