14 DAY TRIAL // The percentage of various flavors of Google's Android operating system in the platform's usage on mobile devices has suffered some more changes over the past few weeks. Recently, we learned that the Android 2.1 flavor was present on half of all Android-based mobile phones on the market, but data collected during two weeks ending on July 1, 2010, shows that the platform flavor is present on 53.1 percent of those devices at the moment. The recently released Android 2.2 platform entered the game too, with a presence on 1.8 percent devices.
The Android distribution chart that can be seen attached to this article (available courtesy of Android Developers), was created based on the number of handsets running under the different versions od Android that accessed the Android Market during the past two weeks. Accrding to the chart, the Android 1.6 operating system is currently used on 23.5 percent of the Android-based mobile phones out there, while the Android 1.5 platform runs on 21.3 percent of them.
In addition to this chart, the Android Developers also provided a graph showing the number of active devices running under a certain version of Android. Moreover, the graph is seen as a great solution for developers interested in learning the relative number of mobile phones that can support an application or another, based on their platform version.
According to Android Developers, every dataset in the timeline was based on the number of Android handsets that accessed the Market during a two weeks period ending on the date indicated on the x-axis.
The graph is described as follows: “Notice that the platform versions are stacked on top of each other with the oldest active version at the top. This format indicates the total percent of active devices that are compatible with a given version of Android. For example, if you develop your application for the version that is at the very top of the chart, then your application is compatible with 100% of active devices (and all future versions), because all Android APIs are forward compatible. Or, if you develop your application for a version lower on the chart, then it is currently compatible with the percentage of devices indicated on the y-axis, where the line for that version meets the y-axis on the right.
