Each month Google publishes information about the various distributions and each month it makes for worrying/interesting reading.
Jelly Bean is now on 28.4%of devices, Ice Cream Sandwich on 27.5% and Gingerbread on 38.5%of devices.
Google last month changed how they get the data as well.
Note: Beginning in April, 2013, these charts are now built using data collected from each device when the user visits the Google Play Store. Previously, the data was collected when the device simply checked-in to Google servers. We believe the new data more accurately reflects those users who are most engaged in the Android and Google Play ecosystem.
What it does show is how nearly three quarters of Android devices are running software more than a year old. So well done to Google for implementing a system to update users devices. Oh wait…. Forget it…..
Honeycomb is amusingly only running on 0.1%of devices. There used to be a lot of tablets running Honeycomb, I guess most have been updated or binned. For more facts and figures head over to the link below.
Source – Android Developers
Ah, the old chestnut of ‘lies, damn lies and statistcis’.
I’m guessing that most devices are running what they can run (i.e, cannot be upgraded past where they are), the users who want to upgrade have done so and the ones that are happy with what they have got are not going to upgrade.
A friend of mine has the same phone as me, his is still running Gingerbread because he sees no reason to upgrade to ICS, I however have upgraded to ICS, made very little difference to be honest. My phone can’t (officially) go to Jelly Bean but runs very nicely on ICS.
Same. My G300 tells me it wants to upgrade to ICS every time I reboot it. I don’t upgrade because the GB dristo is so much better than the ICS one (I know because I had one for a week running ICS which I sent back).
This doesn’t account for anywhere near the amount of handsets that should be updated, but it should be taken into account.
Yup, it is just cold hard figures. TBH it is not that bad, 53% of all Androids running ICS or JB is pretty good. I’ll be on other forums the iPhone fans would be having fun with these numbers. Thing is, with all the different hardware types out there, fragmentation regarding the OS is always going to happen.
I’d love to get an official JB load on my Transformer Prime, Asus say it is coming but I am an impatient sort 😉 Butter, i need butter, and not in a Last tango in Paris way!
What you say about most people not updating because they don’t see the need to rings true I think. I’m the same about just about every piece of computer software I use. I haven’t updated to the latest iOS because the one I have is very stable and does everything I need. That plus most of what it fixes are security holes so they can’t be jailbroken! And what’s my motivation to close that particular hole?
My Android devices are the same, but I tend to update them when the updates become available, which luckily for me is relatively quickly. I’d agree that none of them have made a great deal of difference though (at least to me).
I don’t update unless it fixes a problem, or allows me to run a particular piece of software I need. I believe this is a healthy attitude most of the time. I really hate that Microsoft all-but forces you to update things (and at the same time aggressively interrupts your user experience). If something has that many security holes, it’s not worth paying any money for it anyway!
Yes indeed, I have a PS3, a while back when it got hacked to enable the playing of games directly from a HDD without the disc being inserted there were oodles and oodles of updates that i didn’t need purely to fix the hack. i couldn’t play a game without updating even though i didn’t need it. A right pita that was, especially as my broadband at home is reasonably slow so took ages to update 🙁
My missus had a iPhone 3gs, she kept that on an old version of iOS because it worked fine, everytime she upgraded it to the latest version she lost something, in the end she stopped updating it. A case of…if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.
She now has a 4s and that hasn’t been updated once since she got it 18 months ago.
I made the mistake of upgrading my Xperia Ray to the latest ICS two weeks ago (been putting it off for at least 2 months), even though it was running a good working version of ICS, I lost root and it took me nearly a whole day to get it back and my backups restored, not gonna do that again 🙁