Gingerbread Most Common Android OS Version

by Mike on July 3, 2012

One of the complaints that have been leveled against the Android operating system is the degree of fragmentation that exists within the mobile market. Fragmentation can be a challenge for both hardware vendors as well as for Google themselves as they try and support a variety of different versions across a number of different devices.

In a recent study, we find that one out of every ten devices now uses Android 4.0 which came on the scene nearly 8.5 months ago. This information comes by way of the Android Developer blog which looked at the version of Android that devices were running when they connected into Google Play. Their study ran for nearly 14 days and during this period of time, it was determined that 10.9% of Android devices are using Ice Cream Sandwich or ICS. This number does reflect a gain from the last study and the primary cause of the increase has to be due to older devices that are now seeing Android updates, along with new Android phones that are launching with ICS. These include the HTC One X as well as the Galaxy S III to name just a few.

Still, when you look at the entire ecosystem, the question becomes if only 10.9% are using ICS, what is the most common version of Android in the wild and the answer to this would be Gingerbread which accounts for 64% of the devices. This study only looked at devices that connected into Google Play, but it does seem to indicate that unless companies are willing to launch new Android products with Android 4.1 or Jelly Bean, it will take quite a bit of time to get the current breed of Android devices up to the most recent version of Android and this of course is assuming they can even support Android 4.1.

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