The Android OS has become one of the world’s best-selling smartphone platforms thanks to increasing numbers of the population thronging the mobile market to buy Android powered phones. The official Android Developers website offers details about the relative number of devices running a given version of the Android platform. Accordingly, Android 2.3 or Gingerbread powers merely 0.8% of the total number of Android gizmos.
The Android 2.2 platform, more famously known as Froyo, runs at least 57.6% of Android mobile phones. The second most popular amongst the Android versions is v2.1 or Eclair which runs 31.4% of the said devices. Both, v1.6 and v1.5 are currently being used on 6.3% and 3.9% of mobile gizmos running Google’s OS.
This report also attempts to offer additional information that could be of interest to developers. For instance, applications created by developers that work with older versions of Android will have 100% compatibility with newer and future versions. This is possible due to the fact that all Android APIs are forward compatible.
The forthcoming Android v2.4 may just change current state of affairs if it turns out to be truly comparable with the tablet-optimized Honeycomb OS.