One thing that has been a bit of an issue for Android as an operating system, is getting most of its phones out in the market on its latest version OS. Well, today the search giant has made tremendous progress compared to where it was a few months back. Not too long ago, Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) had only been on 1 percent of devices, which spurred fragmentation criticism from many folks including myself. Now that number has ballooned to about 21 percent (20.8 to be exact), while Jelly Bean numbers also grew from 0.8 to 1.2 percent. Jelly Bean has only been out for a little over a month, so this is a much better update process compared to its ICS predecessor.
Unfortunately, Android 2.3 Gingerbread is still on 57.2 percent of devices out there, which by far is the largest shared version of the Android platform. It’s good to see these numbers change for the better, but it doesn’t help matters when you have wireless providers still releasing phones with a more than two year old version of Android. If Google continues to innovate, it will force these carriers to stop being lazy and keep up with the times. Releasing entry level devices with old ass software only cheapens the Android brand.
What more numbers? Then check the source for a further breakdown of the stats.
[Android Developers; via engadget]