Android 4.x installations overtake 2.3 Gingerbread after 17 months

[Shawn Knight]

It may have taken nearly a year and a half but Android 4.x (all versions of Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean) has finally overtaken Gingerbread as the most widely used version of Google's mobile operating system according to the latest platform data from the search giant.

Adoption of Android 4.x is up 2.5 percent from last month, collectively accounting for 45.1 percent of all installations in the wild. Google’s Gingerbread, however, still runs on 45.4 percent of all devices that visited Google Play within a 14-day period ending on March 4.

Logic tells us that end users would naturally want to migrate to the latest version of Android, currently version 4.2 Jelly Bean but regretfully it’s not always that simple. If nothing else, the numbers highlight a glaring issue facing Android: fragmentation. And it’s not so much the fault of Google as it is phone manufacturers and wireless carriers dragging their feet to bring new software to older phones, but I digress.

Of course, fragmentation is only half the story when looking at Gingerbread as another key reason it still has such a massive install base is due to the fact that it commonly ships on lower-end handsets and feature phones. Given the variety of phones that fit into this category, it becomes a bit easier to understand the disparity between Gingerbread and newer flavors of Android.

What’s more, the hardware inside the majority of budget phones simply isn’t powerful enough to run anything above what it ships with.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/51862-android-4x-installations-overtake-23-gingerbread-after-17-months.html

 

[Guest]

The reason for the fragmentation - for the manufacturer, there is no incentive to revisit an older handset and update the OS. By orphaning the older handsets with the older OS, they believe that gives customers an incentive to purchase a newer handset, which is where the manufacturer makes their money.

Money is a great incentive. If it could be shown that owners of older handsets would be willing to pay a small fee for an OS update, maybe manufacturers would be encouraged to provide these updates.

 

[tipstir]

Started with 1.5 cupcake, then 1.6 donut, 2.0/2.1 elcair, 2.2 froyo, 2.3 gingerbread, honeycomb 3.0, 4.0 ice cream, 4.1 jellybean
and soon to be announced 5.0 key-lime pie.

All these ROM OS, are still build on top of 1.6 donut, making changes along the way with newer coding. Case in point gingerbread and honeycomb share so much of the same code, that gingerbread was hidden but could be unhidden on that platform. The rest about the same except they had new features (coding) to fix issues that plague honeycomb and thus we now have ice cream which had so many releases and now jellybean.

Key-lime pie was suppose to be release which hasn't surface yet and that was suppose to fix issues in jellybean. Right now as I see from my android forums I run there is still a vast number still on 1.6 and 2.3.3. Charts show one aspect that goes unreported. Google base it facts on who access Play Store which version of the OS does. Gingerbread is still used.

Cheaper tablets that use donut out of china and sold here in the USA still modified OS on those tablets and they can do a lot with donut still where they can't do with the others like eclair, froyo, gingerbread, honeycomb (tablet only), ice cream and jellybean. More about licensing control.

Because of all this Market (aka Play Store) wasn't on these tablet running not tablet OS but phone OS all the way up to gingerbread. That's how they got around selling tablets dirt cheap. But now it's all changed, but still phone OS in ice cream was still be used on cheaper tablets.

As for the cell phone, pre-paid Android phone OS still had froyo on them, and the rest had gingerbread. Just last year they started coming with ice cream. Times are changing as well on cheaper tablets to have the most current Android OS on their.

 

[Chazz]

The reason for the fragmentation - for the manufacturer, there is no incentive to revisit an older handset and update the OS. By orphaning the older handsets with the older OS, they believe that gives customers an incentive to purchase a newer handset, which is where the manufacturer makes their money.

Money is a great incentive. If it could be shown that owners of older handsets would be willing to pay a small fee for an OS update, maybe manufacturers would be encouraged to provide these updates.

No way. Those manufacturers need to allow quick access to default android skin so you can choose to update if you want to without waiting for them to update their ****. Google needs to enforce this.