Android Jelly Bean Penetration Up Nearly Three-Fold Since Beginning of Year

At the beginning the year, it was easy to complain about Jelly Bean's slow roll into the Android market, which at the time was still being dominated by Gingerbread (Android 2.3.x), an aging version of Google's open source operating system found on 47.6 percent of all Android devices. Now here we are at the halfway mark and things are looking up for Jelly Bean, though Gingerbread still rules the roost.

Pulling data from the Android Developers Dashboard, which looks at devices that have visited the Google Play Store in the past 14 days, Gingerbread is still in the lead, though its share of Android devices has fallen to 38.5 percent. Jelly Bean has picked up the slack, and then some, by climbing to 28.4 percent, up nearly three-fold from the meager 10.2 percent share of the market it held at the beginning of January.

Android Chart
Source: Google

While Gingerbread finds itself in a fairly steady slide, Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0.x) is much slower to melt away from the market place. In January, ICS was installed on 29.1 percent of all Android devices, and today it's still clinging to 27.5 percent. The easy explanation is that mobile phone makers and wireless carriers are dragging their feet when it comes to upgrading existing devices to Jelly Bean, but are quick to promote new handsets already rocking the latest and greatest version of Android.

LG Optimus G Jelly Bean

The good news here is that if we combine Jelly Bean and ICS, we find that 55.9 percent of Android users are sitting pretty with a current or semi-current version of the OS. Back in January, such users represented just 39.3 percent of the Android market.

Are you using an Android device? If so, which version of Android do you have?