Google's Android One in Indonesia launching with Lollipop 5.1: report

Google’s website for Android One, the low-budget pure-Google smartphones by the company, has revealed the existence of Android 5.1, which will be an update on the latest 5.0.2 version Lollipop, says a report on The Verge. Currently it is the Android One page for Indonesia which is showing the Android 5.1 Lollipop update for these smartphones. We tried updating a Spice Android One smartphone, but the Lollipop update had not yet rolled out to users in India. According to Android Pit, new devices which are being shipped in Indonesia are pre-loaded with Android 5.1. The site says that some of the new features for Android 5.1 are: new silent mode, which was missing in Android 5.0, general improvements in system stability, Improved RAM and battery management. It also solves issues with WIFI, Okay Google as well as notification issues. There are also “changes in the Material Design color palette,” says the report. According to AndroidPolice, Nexus devices are also likely to get the update soon and that Google has been testing Android 5.1 on Nexus 5, Nexus 6, etc. While the Android Lollipop 5.1 update sounds like a great idea, the fact that India Android One users are still to get Android Lollipop update is disappointing given that this was the market where Android One was launched first with so much fanfare. Also regular updates were promised when the phones launched. 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. Hopefully Google will start rectifying this anomaly and more people will get Lollipop on their smartphones, including India’s Android One users.