Android 13 doesn’t have much longer to live as the latest version of Android. What with the impending arrival of Android 14, which just hit its first beta the other day, later in the year. While that is so, as has been the case for many years, it is slowly gaining widespread adoption as more and more devices make the jump to it from Android 12, its predecessor.
According to the latest data from Google, thanks to its reporting tool in Android Studio, Android 13 devices account for at least 12% of all Android devices pinged by early this month. This is an improvement of over double from the 5% that was reported the last time Google updated those stats, back in January. An aside: back in the day, Google used to give monthly stats on a dedicated portal. These days, we have to make do with this IV drip way of doing things at least once a quarter.
At 12%, Android 13 ties with Android 9, which we famously know as Android Pie and which was the last of the operating system versions to have its codename going public.
Since the release of Android 10, Google no longer publicly refers to its Android versions by their internal dessert codenames. That, however, hasn’t stopped the said codenames from spilling over to a curious public. Android 13, for instance, is known as Tiramisu at Google and you can see that it is represented by “T” in the chart below. Android 11, before it, was known internally at Google during development as Red Velvet Cake, hence the “R” in the chart below. Android 14, we just learned, is being referred to as “Upside Down Cake” by Googlers and we even have a clue as to what Android 15, which we can wager is already in the works and should be ready for us next year, goes by “Vanilla Ice Cream”.
Now that we know what the letters in the above chart mean (Q is for Android 10 since we referred to it as Android Q while it was under testing in anticipation of the official confirmation of its internal codename, which never happened. S is for Snow Cone aka Android 12), we can clearly see how each has fared over the years. We are now bidding farewell to Android 4.4 KitKat, the first and last branding partnership involving the versions of Android, as it has now dropped to negligible levels. It’s been around for a whole decade, after all.
