Each month, Google posts the breakdown of its Android versions, ostensibly for developers to see which ones they can target with their apps.
As of August 1st, over 40% of users run Jelly Bean and, combined with Ice Cream Sandwich, 63% of users run phones with Android 4.0 or above. While this is not necessarily the target we’re looking for — over 90% of iOS users run the latest version, according to Apple — it indicates that Google has largely stabilized the fragmentation issue.
Gingerbread is holding fairly steady at 33%, dropping only 1.1% from the previous month. In fact, Ice Cream Sandwich also dropped from last month as more devices were upgraded to Jelly Bean, both in the 4.1 and 4.2 flavours. Google’s now next-to-newest version, Android 4.2, is only running on 6.5% of devices, and some of them would have been upgraded to 4.3 in the past week or so.
Unfortunately, Android 1.6, 2.1 and 2.2 still exist, though their numbers are dwindling as users replace their phones with newer models.
The big takeaway from this is that developers can now soundly target Android 4.0+ without worrying that they’re alienating the entire ecosystem, something that couldn’t be said a year ago.
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