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Gingerbread is almost dead according to the newest monthly Android distribution numbers handed out by Google, and a number of us couldn’t be happier. Over the years Android 2.3 Gingerbread has held onto its crown as the leading version of Android and didn’t let go for nearly 3 years; the longest any version of Android had remained dominant up to that point. August 2013 was the first month that any other version of Android finally overtook the severely aging Gingerbread, and that version was Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. To this day Android 4.1 Jelly Bean still reigns supreme with 35.5% of the Android-toting crowd still running the nearly 2-year old OS, while newer versions of Android are still slow at the uptake.
Breaking down individual figures we see that Android 4.1 has actually lost 0.4% market share, while Android 4.2, 4.3 and 4.4 all picked up some from January’s numbers. Android 4.3 Jelly Bean saw a 1.1% increase in market share, which is very likely due to the myriad of updates that have gone through the pipeline since the beginning of this year. Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, which is generally considered a failure in terms of adoption rates, actually jumped almost a full percentage point in just a month. Whether or not this was just due to the AT&T HTC One X finally getting its Android 4.2.2 update with Sense 5.0 or not is difficult to determine, but given how big AT&T is there’s no reason to think that nearly 1% of all US Android users don’t have a One X on the carrier.
Other surprising news to see is that KitKat is on nearly 2% of all Android phones in the US, likely more due to Motorola getting the Moto X and Moto G up to date with Android 4.4.2 KitKat than Google’s Nexus 5 selling extraordinarily well. Typically the Nexus lineup of devices doesn’t seem to have served more than a half a percentage point or so of the total US Android market, and given that both Nexus 7 tablets and the Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 are all on KitKat, we’re probably not looking at more than 1% of total users utilizing Google’s in-house phones and tablets overall. That other 1% (give or take) could be Motorola’s portion of the pie, but even then Motorola’s now got half a dozen phones on KitKat, which should paint a sad picture of their current market share as a whole. We expect HTC and Samsung’s upcoming KitKat updates to pull those numbers up fairly significantly, especially given how well the Galaxy S4 and Note 3 have been selling.
Source: Android Developers