Ice Cream Sandwich finds home on 3% of Android

In its ever continuing climb to grow numbers, Google says nearly 3% of active Android users are running Android 4.0 or later.

The newest version, also called Ice Cream Sandwich or ICS, has had a rough rollout so far.

The two first devices that were slated for upgrades – the Nexus S phone and the Transformer Prime tablet – ended up getting tons of negative publicity after the update crashed the system for numerous users. As a result, manufacturers have been increasingly tepid about pushing the update.

Nevertheless, a bunch of phones currently running an older version of Android will be eligible to upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich beginning in the coming months.

There’s a new trend of seemingly fully functional Ice Cream Sandwich updates being leaked on the Internet before launching to the phones themselves, time and time again, showing that manufacturers are uneasy about the update this time around.

Nevertheless, it was just a couple weeks ago that Google said only 1.6% of Android devices were running ICS, so that number is finally starting to grow at a nice pace.

According to the latest official numbers, Android 2.3 – 2.7, also known as Gingerbread, still accounts for the vast majority – 63.7%.

That’s followed by Android 2.2 (Froyo) at 23.1%, and then Android 2.1 (Eclair) at 6.0%. Android 3.0, Honeycomb, which is only used on Android tablets, accounts for 3.3% of Android devices.

Legacy versions Android 1.5 and Android 1.6 still make up a combined 1%.