Google Releases Updated Android Fragmentation Report

[budney]

Google Releases Updated Android Fragmentation Report

Google today has released on their developer site an updated chart showing the percentages of which flavor of Android are making up what is out in the wild on Android handsets. This is for devs to be able to develop appropriately for the percentages of users out there.

One has to feel for the Android devs out there. I know I do. With this kind of fragmentation it is almost as bad as developing for the web with the many different browsers out there. Notice in the chart below that most of Android users out there are still running 1.5 or 1.6. An interesting fact considering that we are starting to see many apps come out that are 2.1 only. Checkout the chart below to see the breakdown.

The breakdown is as follows:

Android Platform Percent of Devices
Android 1.1 0.1%
Android 1.5 34.1%
Android 1.6 28.0%
Android 2.0 0.2%
Android 2.0.1 0.4%
Android 2.1 37.2%

Google Releases Updated Android Fragmentation Report | AndroidGuys

[SteveW]

Wirelessly posted (T-Mobile G1: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 1.6; en-us; T-Mobile G1 Build/DMD64) AppleWebKit/528.5+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.2 Mobile Safari/525.20.1)

It seems that the combination of limited memory on some early Android phones (e.g. the G1) and the limited ability of carriers to push out and support updates, has held a lot of Android users back. I suspect that the major release numbers will only change as users change phones (sort of like PCs). That's not necessarily a bad thing. I'm happy to get OTA updates at all.


SW

[crood]

Kind of strange timing. With the two Sprint phones getting the 2.1 update in the last week, those numbers aren't going to be accurate for long.

[our3rotts]

The 2 week rollout of the ERIS 2.1 update is not fully complete, as it just came out last week. Those 1.5 numbers will definitely drop.

[budney]

Android 2.1 now on 45 percent of devices
Posted on Tuesday, Jun 1, 2010 by Phil Nickinson



Another couple of weeks, and more new numbers regarding Android platform percentages. For the two weeks ending June 1, we now see 45.1 percent of Android phones running Eclair -- Android 2.1. That's up from 32.4 percent for the two weeks ending May 17. The Cupcake (Android 1.5) and Donut (Android 1.6) versions continue to wane, thanks to the HTC Droid Eris and Hero finally getting their long awaited updates. Cupcake is down 6.5 percentage points, while Donut dropped 1.6 percentage points. [Android Developer Blog]

Android 2.1 now on 45 percent of devices | Android Central