Android in February: Jelly Bean improves, but over 50% of devices still run a 2 year old OS

Google has released the monthly update to its Platform Version dashboard today. The graphs provide a summary of devices which access the Google Play store in a 14-day period, with the most recent report showing activity for the two-week period ending March 4, 2013. As we’d expect, the number of devices running Android 4.1-4.2 Jelly Bean has jumped from 13.6% in February to 16.5% in March, signaling continued progress on the part of manufacturers and carriers bringing Google’s latest OS to the 2012 flagship devices.

The numbers are still nowhere near where Google would like them to be, evidenced by the fact that over 50% of all active Android device are running Gingerbread or prior, which was released in December 2010. This last fact bears repeating; 1 in 2 Android devices which accessed the Play Store in the last 2 weeks were running a 25 month old version of the Android operating system. The reason for this is a combination of carriers slowing down the update process, hardware incompatibilities, and manufacturers being slow to upgrade custom UI skins.

This compares to about 60% of all iOS devices ever released running on the latest version of iOS, despite several devices not being eligible for the upgrade. Of course, the matter could be worse, as a whopping 0% of Windows Phone devices released prior to November 2012 running the latest version of Windows Phone, and Microsoft and manufacturers have indicated they never will, instead providing these devices Windows Phone 7.8, with only a handful of the features found in the new OS.

Via: The Next Web

android, android platform version, fragmentation