The latest Android platform numbers are in, and they show a nice rise in the amount of phones running version 4.0.
The latest version of Google’s mobile operating system, also known as Ice Cream Sandwich, is now powering 4.9% of active Android devices, according to the company’s official statistics.
Meanwhile, Android 2.3, Gingerbread, remains the dominant version, still living on 64.4% of all Android devices. Android 2.3 is the most up-to-date version of Google’s smartphone software before Android 4.0. The 3.0 designation is only used on Android tablets, which accounts for 3.3% of all Android devices.
The percentage of Gingerbread devices actually grew over last month, because there are still trickling rollouts for phones being upgraded from version 2.2, also known as Froyo.
Froyo now represents 20.9% of the Android installed base, while Android 2.1, Eclar, dropped to 5.5%. The legacy versions 1.5 and 1.6, combined, do not even make up one percent.
Last month, Ice Cream Sandwich was living on just 2.9% of Android devices. In April, though, updates finally arrived for a couple of the most popular phones like the Galaxy Nexus S 4G and the Galaxy S II.
In addition, we’re finally at the point where new Android phones are being shipped with Ice Cream Sandwich installed out of the box.
Google hopes Android 4.0 will be a big reset button on the mobile platform, since it has much stricter hardware guidelines that it hopes will help prevent fragmentation in the future. This is a goal we’ve heard in previous rollouts of Android, so we’ll see if it actually is realized this time.
