Jan 6, 2011 13:38 GMT  ·  By

Google's Android 2.2 Froyo platform iteration is accounting for the largest number of Android devices out there, being present on no less than 51.8 percent of the active Androids that accessed the Market in the two weeks prior to January 4th, 2011.

The latest data published on the Android Developers website shows that this OS version gained over 8 percent share of the Android distribution charts since December 1st, 2010, when it was loaded on 43.4 percent devices.

According to the said data, Android 2.1 was present on 35.2 percent of all active Android devices out there, down from the 39.6 percent it accounted for as of December 1st.

The charts show a newcomer too, namely Android 2.3 Gingerbread, which accounted for 0.4 percent of active handsets accessing the Market during the said time frame.

Older platforms, namely Android 1.5 and Android 1.6 decreased their share even more, being present on 4.7 percent and 7.9 percent of Android devices, respectively.

It's a common fact that Google is offering these details to developers, offering them a glimpse at most active Android devices out there, so that they could focus their applications on these OS releases.

Although Google calls it platform distribution, there are some who stress on the fact that this is actually the fragmentation of Android that is being showed here.

This state of fact might also be proved by the fact that Google has just unveiled a new flavor of the mobile OS, Android 3.0 Honeycomb, which was built from the ground up to fit the large screen of tablet PCs.

Designed specifically for tablet PCs, the new OS flavor widens even more the gap between various Android iterations.

However, it should start appearing in these charts as soon as the first devices running under it land on shelves sometime in the first quarter of the ongoing year.

“The [...] stacked line graph [to the left] provides a history of the relative number of active Android devices running different versions of the Android platform. It also provides a valuable perspective of how many devices your application is compatible with, based on the platform version,” Google notes.

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Android platform distribution as of January 4th, 2011
Android platform distribution as of January 4th, 2011
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