Ice Cream Sandwich Now on 5% of Android Devices

After Ice Cream Sandwich’s release alongside the Samsung Galaxy Nexus last December it received many plaudits and people who are yet to receive it are waiting very impatiently for the all-important update notification.

Now as we’re entering the month of May, it seems to be a time for distribution charts detailing all the versions of Android’s different OS’s as well as the percentage of market share that is currently using them. The primary focus of the chart that is pictured above is the latest OS, Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich which seems to be available on 5% of all Android devices up from 3% in last month.

Although the difference is visibly tiny, it at least shows that Google has been pushing out updates to devices that were running Gingerbread prior to it but it could also be due to an increase in sales of smartphones already running Ice Cream Sandwich. A 2% increase is definitely a lot better than if there was no change to the figure after a month.

As far as the other Android versions are concerned, Android 2.3 Gingerbread is still distantly in the lead with a massive 64% of the market share, followed by Android 2.2 Froyo which holds 20.9% of all devices, Android 2.1 Éclair which is just a little ahead of Ice Cream Sandwich with 5.5%, Android 3.0 Honeycomb with 3.3% and Android 1.5 Cupcake and 1.6 Donut fading away with 1% of the total market share.

Although this distribution chart does show what we expected, it is not a good growth for Android’s latest OS. With rumors about yet another Android OS called Jelly Bean said to launch in Q3 floating around, would it be a good thing to introduce it to the ecosystem given the slow adoption rates of even Ice Cream Sandwich?

Pradeep Chandrasekaran
Categories: Cellphones, Tablets, Web
Tags: Android