Thanks to Google’s speedy updates, Android 10 adoption has been faster than all other versions

Android 11 is launching later this year and thanks to partners releasing device updates faster than ever, the adoption of Android 10 has been better than it has been for all previous versions of the software.

And for this, Google gives credit to some ‘key initiatives’ like Android Oreo’s Project Treble that allowed a system/vendor split and made way for a cleaner separation of OEM and SoC dependencies from the rest of the code base. Android Pie adoption went up by 2.5t times since it was a staple in all modern devices.

The Generic System images introduced in Android 9 allowed for expanded compatibility testing on real devices without OEMs having to do more work. This also accommodated for a 1.5x boost for Android 10 adoption as well, reports 9to5Google.

For Google, these efforts have helped Android 10 reach 100 million devices in just five months since launch. That’s 28% faster than Pie.

Android 10 has its own unique features as well like Project Mainline. With Project Mainline, Google can directly update all key system components for privacy and security and currently, Android 10 is on 285 million devices.

Android 11 brings in nine additions including NNAPI, Tethering, Cell Broadcast Receiver, Internet Key Exchange, adbd, WiFi and SDK extension, Media Provider and statsd. That’s a total of 21 OS components. Some of the Android 11 highlights include “enhanced permissions components” that standardise user and developer access to privacy controls, the NNAPI (neural networks API) component that helps optimise performance and assured consistent APIs across devices and then there is the tethering component for better interoperability.

According to Google, seven OEMs have released Android 11 Developer Previews for 13 of their devices already and a Virtual A/B OTA mechanism will help carry through seamless updates with a reboot and need less storage space. Earlier approaches needed double the amount of storage for the OS thereby limiting adoption among OEMs, particularly for Samsung.

“We are working closely with our OEM partners to begin implementing Virtual A/B in Android 11 devices, making OTAs as frictionless as possible. Going forward, Virtual A/B will be the only supported OTA mechanism in Android,” Google said.