Android One smartphones start receiving Lollipop update in India

As promised, Android One phones in India have started receiving the Lollipop update. Caesar Sengupta, vice-president of product management at Google, writes in an official Google+ post that Lollipop rollout has begun for a small number of phones and gradually roll out to others.

“We’ve already started rolling out Lollipop to a small number of phones in India. This is a gradual process and so each week we’ll push the OTA update to more phones selected at random (pro-tip: connecting over WiFi will increase your odds),” he writes.

However, he hasn’t mentioned any specific handsets that will receive the update. We had noted in the past that Android One has struggled to make sales in India. The three phones produced by Micromax, Spice and Karbonn were initially available exclusively online but as it did not set the cash registers ringing, it was then made available to retailers across India. Even major retailers refused to stock the phones.

The Economic Times had reported that eight major electronics retailers in India including Tata-owned Croma, Future Group, Planet MRetail and Next Retail, BigC, Lot Mobiles, Reliance Retail and Sangeetha Mobiles, which between them have 1,800 stores, had not stocked any of the three Android One smartphones.

Where Android Lollipop’s adoption goes, it is abysmally low even three months after release. According to Google’s own data only 1.6 percent devices are running Android Lollipop. Android 4.4 KitKat is running on 39.7 percent devices but Jelly Bean is still the most dominant if you were to add all three versions of the OS. If you add Jelly Bean 1,2 and 3, it’s currently running on 44.4 percent devices, which is a fairly high number given that this is an OS that is more than two years old.