The success of Android as a mobile operating system has been tremendous over the past few years. Even though the initial versions weren’t really good, Google improved it vastly since the Ice Cream Sandwich release back in 2011. But the problem faced by Android is that there are quite a lot of budget phones being launched across the world running out-dated OS. For example, you can still see several low end phones launching with 3 year old Android Gingerbread.
This is a major issue when it comes to Android and another one is the lack of proper updates to latest versions from phone manufacturers. The latest version of Google Android is currently at 4.2.2 and we are expecting Android 4.3 to be released soon.
So which are the Android versions that are currently popular? Google has released the latest stats for month of May 2013 and here are the details.
As you can see from the chart above, Jelly Bean (4.1 and 4.2 combined) has a market share of 33% which is pretty good, but what is worrying is that Gingerbread still has the majority of share at around 36.4%.
Each snapshot of data represents all the devices that visited the Google Play Store in the prior 14 days. Beginning in April, 2013, these charts are now built using data collected from each device when the user visits the Google Play Store. Previously, the data was collected when the device simply checked-in to Google servers.
While this is a good sign that the adoption rates for latest version is increasing, lack of updates is still a major issue for Android users.
