It’s taken almost a year but Jelly Bean is the most installed Android OS, which isn’t saying much given it still only commands a small lead with 37.9% of all Android devices running on Jelly Bean.
All those devices aren’t all running the same version of Jelly Bean either, with the divide being mainly focused on the older version, 4.1, rather than the much newer 4.2.
It’s no surprise that Google has a fragmentation problem, given the vast range of devices and skins that have plagued Android since inception — but this could be the first signs of things getting better.
Bear in mind that these results are only for the devices which access the Google Play Store — so there could be some inaccuracies, given not all devices have access to the Play Store, such as the Kindle Fire.
Gingerbread has been around for almost 3 years, a worrying prospect given that it’s still the single most installed version, if you count 4.1 and 4.2 separately — the fact that an OS that old is still commanding 34.1% of all Android installs just goes to show the scale of the problem Google has to rectify.
The company has already tried to tackle the issue, manipulating its data so that older versions of OS had less of a share, but it seems that it hasn’t yet gone far enough.
Hopefully the situation will change, but with OEMs lagging behind because of their own skins, I doubt we’ll see this anytime soon.
