Gingerbread remains King, Jelly Bean only has 6.7% share

With this fast-paced Android world, this is what we could all expect. New Android updates were being released from time to time that’s why a huge chunk of users get left out on older versions. This report from Google shows how bad the timing of Android updates are – or how slow the manufacturers move.

Gingerbread takes the lion’s share!

As you can see on the graph above, Android 2.3 Gingerbread eats the lion’s share at above 50% while Ice Cream Sandwich is on the second place at 27.5%. The most recent version, Jelly Bean, only holds 6.7% which means only a handful of users are on the said OS as of the moment.

[one_half]”It looks like Gingerbread is Android’s own version of Windows XP”[/one_half]

Obviously, the main reason of these slow adoption from Android users is because their manufacturers doesn’t provide an update on older devices which means they are forced to stay on Gingerbread or else they need to buy a new smartphone. The ICS, on the other hand, only had a very short growth since devices who run ICS out of the box will receive a Jelly Bean upgrade while most low-end Gingerbread phones weren’t provided ICS.

So is Gingerbread the “Windows XP”? Yes, I think so. This will continue to happen until Google (or the manufacturers) find a faster way to provide updates on their users. However, some android users couldn’t care less for their OS version. As long as it runs the apps and games that they want, they’re fine with that. Interestingly, we could still some marks of handsets that are running on 1.5 Cupcake and 1.6 Donut.

I think Google should just release an update which are inter-compatible to several android handsets while the manufacturer skins and customization should just follow. That way, upgrades will be faster. Unfortunately, we don’t see that kind of thing being implemented anytime soon.

How about you? Which Android OS are you on right now?