Android Version Fragmentation

Interesting analysis by Chris Sauve:

In fact, I feel it is conservative to state that 2012 will be the year of Gingerbread, at least in terms of version distribution. Gingerbread appears to be on the verge of peaking as a percentage of the total devices in use, but it took Froyo over 6 months after reaching the peak of its relative distribution to be overtaken. As I’ll go into next, Gingerbread is still adding devices 14 times faster than ICS.

It seems pretty clear that with Android, the current year’s phones tend to run the previous year’s software. Best to think of today’s Ice Cream Sandwich as a developer preview of next year’s mass market Android phones.

★ Sunday, 26 February 2012