Majority of Android devices still on 2.3, 4.1 and 4.0 grow
updated 03:53 pm EDT, Fri November 2, 2012
New Android figures show growing adoption of 4.0, 4.1
Google has released the latest install base numbers for all versions of its Android mobile operating system, showing that version 2.3 Gingerbread remains the most widespread installed version by far, but devices running Android 4.0 and 4.1 are steadily increasing as a share of the overall install base. The newest Android dashboard figures show version 2.3 on a total of 54.2 percent of Android devices, while version 4.0 is now installed on a quarter of all Android devices.
After versions 2.3 and 4.0, the most prevalent version of Android was version 2.2. Versions 2.2 and 2.3 are most commonly run on older, lower-end hardware, though a number of devices -- among them many Motorola handsets -- running 2.3 were released in the past year.
The new numbers bode well for the two newest versions of Android. At the beginning of August of this year, Android 4.1 Jelly Bean was installed on less than one percent of Android devices. The latest version of Android has, in the space of three months, come to account for nearly three percent of the hundreds of millions of devices running Android.
Likewise, the numbers for Android 4.0 demonstrate either rapid adoption of that platform or significant sales of new devices running it. The beginning of August saw Android 4.0 on 16 percent of Android devices, and the version's install share has grown more than 50 percent in the three months since then.
