One month after launch, KitKat is installed on 1.1% of active Android devices

It’s been just over one month since Google formally introduced KitKat, and the first check on the progress of the newest version of Android shows it has been installed on 1.1 percent of the total number of active Android smartphones and tablets.

The figures come from Google’s latest Android dashboard which assessed the installation rate of various Android builds on all of the devices that visited the Google Play app store during the past week.

KitKat comes with the new Nexus 5 and has begun rolling out to some devices — including the Moto X, and Google Play editions of the Samsung Galaxy S4 and HTC One — that early momentum helped it chalk up an initial 1.1 percent. That figure is likely to increase significantly as Samsung, HTC, Motorola and Sony roll out KitKat across their devices over the coming weeks and months.

Google’s previous numbers from November showed Jelly Bean (Android 4.1-4.3) passed 50 percent adoption for the first time, and the KitKat predecessor has now increased to 54.5 percent overall.

Of the others, the rate of Ice Cream Sandwich installations declined slightly from 19.8 percent in November to 18.6 percent, while Gingerbread (Android 2.3) — which remains well-used despite being two years old — fell from 26.3 percent to 24.1 percent.

Google tweaked the way it measures its Android installations back in April, changing the criteria from all devices that merely check-in to Google services, to those that access the Google Play app store specifically.

While that means these figures paint an inaccurate representation of Android adoption across all devices out there — since it only measures the number of devices that access Google Play and not all phones and tablets out there — Google is giving developers a more accurate view of the audience that they can hope to reach with their apps.

Image via suhakri_hsu / Flickr