It seems that it wasn’t too long ago that Android 2.3 (and its subsequent variants) was the dominant Android operating system, but according to recent statistics (via Android Developers), Android 4.x has finally caught up. While Android 2.3 Gingerbread is still sitting at a whopping 44.2%, Android 4.x and its versions collectively represent 45.1% of active use, beating out Gingerbread 2.3 by a very narrow margin. Even better news is that as far as Android 4.1/4.2 Jelly Bean is concerned, it seems that it is active on 16.5% of current users. Of course we expect that these figures don’t take into account rooted Android phones running on custom ROMs like CyanogenMod 9/10, but those are still pretty decent figures and we can only imagine it will be a matter of time before those numbers start to increase even further.
The question is will any of these versions of Android reach the same level as Android 2.3 Gingerbread? It’s hard to say, especially since the next version of Android after Gingerbread was Honeycomb, a version of Android that was designed specifically for tablets in mind. This meant that OEMs had to work with Gingerbread for longer periods of time compared to now, where they have the option of going for Android 4.0 ICS or Android 4.1/4.2 Jelly Bean, not forgetting that there are probably a good many older devices that weren’t eligible for the upgrade to Android 4.0. Many expect Google to introduce the next major revision of Android, Android 5.0 Key Lime Pie, at Google I/O later this year and it will be interesting to see what the numbers will look like then.
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