Google recently released the latest Android OS version numbers on the developer blog, and as we suspected, Gingerbread is definitely on its way up. Well, maybe not sky-rocketing upwards, but Gingerbread will soon be the next “Froyo” that will encompass most of Android’s install base in due time.
Looking back to March of this year, Gingerbread was barely a blip on the radar, not even consisting of a full 2% of the install base. While it’s not growing like wildfire, the climb to almost a quarter of all Android devices in a few months is definitely a nice thing to see. With most (notable) Android handsets now shipping with Gingerbread out of the gate, this spike in numbers isn’t much of a surprise. Android 2.2 Froyo still holds 55.9% of the pie, down just 3.5% from last month.
One version we’re very happy to see dwindling down is Android 2.1, Eclair. In March of this year, Eclair held onto almost 30% of Android devices and now only holds 15.2%. With the influx of Gingerbread devices coming to market, we can only hope that Eclair will begin to shrink even more as time goes on. On the downside, if your handset is still rocking Android 2.1, we have our doubts it will be updated to anything further. Officially, at least.
After Ice Cream Sandwich officially becomes available in the next couple of months, the Android version numbers should escape the existing trends and slowly unify. While it will take a while for the many millions of devices to get up to speed (and not all will) Ice Cream Sandwich is the update Android has needed for some time now and we can only hope it will ease the issues the platform has been battling for some time now. Hell, even if it doesn’t, we’ll still have the nicest looking version of the OS yet.
Meanwhile, Honeycomb has officially made it past the 1% point. Hooray?
[Via: AndroidDevelopers]