Pornhub Rises to Tell us Android Stats That Google Does Not Want to Share

It has been a while since Google updated the Android distribution dashboard which tells us the exact share of each Android version and how many devices being actively used around the world use which version of the Android operating system. Google hasn’t updated this data since May. But well, don’t be disappointed, because Pornhub has risen to the occasion. The company has shared the annual Year in Review data and that tells us a lot about the Android usage statistics and the status of the Android updates. Well, at least we have an idea.

Pornhub obviously doesn’t know exactly which version of Android the smartphones and tablets around the world are using—at least it knows for those devices that have been used to access Pornhub and possibly watch porn videos. Which we assume would be many. Pornhub’s numbers suggest that in 2019, as much as 48 percent of the Android share was taken by devices running Android 9 Pie, which was released in 2018. This was followed, and this is a turn off, by 23 percent from Android Oreo (released in 2017) and 12 percent from Android Nougat (released in 2016). The very latest and supposedly greatest Android 10 clocked only 2 percent of the traffic to Pornhub.

Android 10 was released in September and is available for the four generations of Google’s own Pixel phones, the OnePlus 7 and the OnePlus 7T series, the Samsung Galaxy S10 series, a lot of Nokia phones, the Xiaomi Redmi K20 series and a bunch of Nokia phones as well, to name a few.

Important to again clarify that Pornhub’s data only gives us a picture of the Android ecosystem based on how much traffic it got from smartphones and tablets running some version of Android. At least till Google bothered with it, the dashboard tracked how many devices are running each version of Android—and that is for all active devices around the world. While Pornhub’s data isn’t replacing the Google Dashboard data, it surely gives us an idea of where the Android adoption currently stands.

Perhaps Google doesn’t really bother with that data because the stats for the very latest Android version aren’t always the most triumphant. That certainly seems to be the case with Android 10.

It seems Pornhub can be depended on for more than one thing.