Android 4.0 and 4.1 on More Android Devices, Gingerbread Still Leads

Google’s Android 4.x platform releases have gained a bit more share on the platform distribution charts in October, though the older Gingerbread release is still leading the pack.

During the two weeks ending November 1, 25.8 percent of all Android devices that accessed the Google Play Store were powered by Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, new data from Google shows.

Moreover, Android 4.1 Jelly Bean was loaded on 2.7 percent of all these devices, which means that almost a third of all active Android products are powered by platform releases made available in the past 12 months.

However, Android 2.3 Gingerbread is still enjoying a wide spread presence on these devices, with over 54.2 percent of them running one of its versions (0.3 percent run 2.3 – 2.3.2 flavors of the platform, while 53.9 percent run 2.3.3 - 2.3.7 variants).

Compared to September, Gingerbread lost some two percentage points, yet the drop is very small when compared to the total number of devices that are still powered by it.

Android 3.1 Honeycomb is still loaded on 1.8 percent active Android devices (only tablets, we presume, since this platform release was meant for these devices alone).

As for older OS versions, such as 2.2 Froyo, 2.1 Éclair, 1.6 Donut and 1.5 Éclair, their overall share of the Android distribution chart went down to less than 16 percent (12%, 3.1%, 0.3% and 0.1%, respectively).

Jelly Bean is expected to see a surge in distribution soon, especially with a great deal of platform upgrades promised by various mobile phone makers around the world, and with a new flavor set to hit shelves soon, namely Android 4.2.

As mentioned above, all these numbers come from Google themselves, and are based on data collected from the Google Play store in the 14-day period ending November 1. Those who would like to learn additional info on the matter should head over to this page on the Android Developers website.