Android is a ludicrously popular operating system, and Google let us know just how popular at its I/O keynote today. According to Android director Stephanie Cuthbertson, there are more than two and a half billion active Android devices around the world today.

Those 2.5 billion devices were produced by more than 180 hardware manufacturers, and they're not all smartphones. The number also encompasses just about any device with Google Assistant built in, including smart speakers, smart displays, and even KaiOS phones.

Google has finally published updated Android distribution numbers for the first time since last October.

The last time Google released a version distribution report for Android devices was in October, meaning that we've come into our seventh month without that data and our ninth month of not knowing how much of the user base are on Pie. We've been working for months to get answers from Google on what's been going on. Well, the company is finally ready to give out some answers at I/O 2019, giving us new distribution figures.

The latest dataset shows that Android 9 is on 10% of devices sampled, what Google says is a 150% improvement from Android 8.0 Oreo's progress this time last year.

Distribution information will continue to be broken down in the same ways as before — through version number, API level, and share — though Google is working on getting more data points to developers over the next several months.

A source has told us that the dashboard outage was due to the unexpected loss of the source of the usage data — that source recorded diagnostic points about the devices requesting Play services. Google has since found another source that looks to be consistent with how the previous method delivered that data, so the dashboard is back in business, at least for now.

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