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Lollipop becomes the most popular version of Android

It took a year and a half to reach this point.

Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

At last, there's a new flavor of Android on top of the heap. Google has published updated stats which show that Lollipop is now the most-used version of Android, snagging 36.1 percent of device share in early March versus former champ KitKat's 34.3 percent. It's a big milestone that suggests many Android users are using a reasonably modern take on the mobile platform.

As VentureBeat notes, Lollipop is claiming the lead 16 months after it shipped, and 5 months after the arrival of Marshmallow. Phone owners have either had to wait a long time for their Lollipop upgrades, or they were in no rush to get those few devices running the latest code.

On the positive front, Marshmallow use nearly doubled in the space of a month, to 2.3 percent. That's far from huge (it's the same share as the 2011-era Ice Cream Sandwich), but it shows that Marshmallow upgrades are arriving in earnest. And those figures should get a healthy boost soon: Marshmallow-toting flagships like the LG G5 and Samsung Galaxy S7 are arriving in force this spring, so many users will jump to Google's freshest OS as a matter of course.