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Android flavor Marshmallow is now on 10 percent of Android devices

The latest version of Android just hit a big, big milestone. Google's early June developer stats have revealed that Marshmallow is now on just over 10 percent of Android devices, representing a huge jump from just 2.3 percent in March. Notably, only some of that surge can be credited to people upgrading from Lollipop. While the not-quite-current version's adoption did go down (to 35.4 percent), the biggest declines in usage were for Jelly Bean and KitKat. In essence: many of those moving to Marshmallow may well have been replacing devices that were 3 or more years old.

If you bought a brand new device this spring, especially if it was reasonably high-end, it might have been hard to avoid Marshmallow.




The timing isn't coincidental, as you might have gathered. In the three months since we last looked back, numerous smartphone makers have delivered Marshmallow phones in force. The Galaxy S7 is the big kahuna, but you can also point to phones like the HTC 10, LG G5 and Sony's newer Xperias as factors. 


Your storage device really gets adopted
Android has had limited support for removable storage in one form or another since the beginning. With Marshmallow, the new Adoptable storage feature lets you turn your removable SD card option into a more or less permanent (and no longer removable) part of the device.
When you insert an SD card into the HTC One A9 or something like your G4 or V10 that has been updated to Marshmallow, you have the choice of using it as a Portable device or an Internal device if you go to reformat it. If you choose Portable, it acts like any other SD card and you can take it out and swap it between devices at your leisure.




If you choose Internal, things change. The device is formatted as a local, 128-bit AES encrypted EXT4 drive and mounted as part of the system. It's then set as the preferred storage, and you're prompted to move data over. Newly generated data is placed on the adopted storage by default. 


NOTE: You must backup all your file on sdcard because of the formatting process.

To us, the big unknown is how well Marshmallow will fare by the time its successor rolls around in a few months, around Marshmallow's first anniversary. Lollipop took a year and a half to become the dominant Android flavor. Although Marshmallow isn't necessarily going to repeat history, its year-one figures should give you a good idea as to whether or not it's doing as well as its predecessor.


Source: Android Developers

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