Android Gingerbread On Over Half Of Devices, As ICS Challenge Begins

Google and its Android manufacturing partners have finally managed to get the majority of devices in the wild up to date with Gingerbread... just in time for them to be outdated again thanks to Ice Cream Sandwich. According to the latest platform distribution stats, 2.3.x is now found on 50.6-percent of all Android devices – or at least those which accessed the Android Market in the fourteen days prior to December 1 – up from 43.9-percent last month.

That means Froyo has been pushed into second place, with Android 2.2 accounting for 35.3-percent of devices. Android 2.1 Eclair lingers in third place, with 9.6-percent, while Honeycomb – the version of Android specific for tablets – is on just 2.4-percent of the active devices Google is recording.

The difficulty in keeping the hundreds of Android-based devices up to date with the latest version of the platform – generally known as fragmentation – is a problem reasonably specific to Google's software at present. With so many OEMs offering products, many of them making their own modifications and tweaks to the OS, not to mention differing specifications of the hardware itself, many buyers have found themselves falling behind in comparison to other handsets on the market.

Gingerbread's share should increase some in next month's batch of stats, with a number of devices getting Android 2.3 upgrades in the past week or so. Verizon's DROID CHARGE and the European Milestone 2, along with the LG Optimus 3D all saw OTA updates being pushed out in November.

More on Ice Cream Sandwich in the full SlashGear review.

[via Android Community]