Android adoption: Jelly Bean catches up with Ice Cream Sandwich

Google’s latest Android adoption figures show that Jelly Bean is on the up, having overtaken Ice Cream Sandwich. And while Gingerbread still dominates, it’s falling pretty quickly.

Jelly Bean 4.1.x and 4.2.x combined now make up 28.4% of all Android devices, meaning that it has officially overtaken Ice Cream Sandwich, present on 27.5% of devices.

If the current trend continues, Jelly Bean could overtake Gingerbread, still present on a substantial 38.4% of devices, in a few months’ time. Gingerbread’s been kicking around since December 2010. Given that Jelly Bean has only been around since June 2012, it’s pretty impressive that it’s managed to achieve such high-levels of adoption.

Getting people onto Jelly Bean that quickly also shows that Google is going a long way toward sorting out Android’s fragmentation issues.

In April, Google changed the way it calculates Android adoption. It now takes snapshots for devices where the user intentionally visits the Google Play Store during a given period whereas previously it counted any check ins to Google servers.

It says that this is meant to more accurately portray the users who are “most engaged in the Android and Google Play ecosystem”.

It also leaves out data from countries such as China, which use alternative app stores. That country in particular is flooded with low-end Android devices, many of which are forked from official versions of Android.

A realistic count of Android adoption would therefore look quite different from what Google is officially reporting.

The tech behemoth is reportedly set to release a new version Android at its annual I/O developers’ conference later this month. In all likelihood though, that will be another Jelly Bean update, rather than Android 5.0, set to be named Key Lime Pie.