14 DAY TRIAL // Android 2.2 Froyo, the platform version that Mountain View-based Internet giant Google announced officially over half a year ago, is currently powering over 57.6 percent of all active handsets running under Android.
This marks an increase of over 5 percentage points when compared to the number of devices that platform release was loaded on back in early January, namely 51.8 percent of them.
The info is based on data collected during the two weeks period ended February 2nd, 2011, Google notes on the platform distribution page it put up on the Android Developers website.
We should note that this data is based on the number of devices that accessed the Android Market during the aforementioned time frame.
The Android 2.1 platform release accounts for the second largest number of active handsets, namely 31.4 percent, down from the 35.2 percent it accounted for in the beginning of the year.
The Android 1.5 and Android 1.6 platform releases decreased their share even more, now being present on 3.9 percent and 6.3 percent of active devices, respectively, down from 4.7 percent and 7.9 percent.
We should note that, although these platform releases would eventually become obsolete and disappear from these charts, this might not happen too soon, since there are some handsets out there that would never receive an upgrade to a newer flavor of the OS.
The new Android distribution charts from Google also include the Android 2.3 Gingerbread platform version, the newest of them all, which is currently available on 0.8 percent of all active devices, but which should increase its share as more handsets powered by it hit the shelves.
Another platform version that should soon make an appearance here would be Android 3.0 Honeycomb, which was designed specifically for tablet PCs, and which should make it to shelves in the second quarter of the ongoing year.
It's a common fact that these charts are provided by Google mainly to developers, so that they would have a better idea on the platform releases they should target with their applications.
