Jelly Bean overtakes Gingerbread as most popular Android version (finally)

Yep, Android users are moving on: Google’s latest refresh of stats for developers shows that dear old Gingerbread is no longer running on the largest percentage of devices worldwide. The top spot has finally been claimed by the latest version of the operating system — Jelly Bean.

Android 2.3.3 — 2.3.7 (otherwise known as Gingerbread) has been around since early 2011 and has been a favourite among manufacturers of budget Android phones ever since. But Google’s figures, which represent the portion of operating systems used to access Google Play, show that the latest version now holds a combined 37.9% of the pie over Gingerbread’s 34.1%.

Still, Android’s fragmentation issues aren’t over quite yet — that still means that over 60% of Android devices which have accessed Google Play in the last two weeks are still running an outdated version of the software and are unable to use new features like Google Now. But the trend is encouraging — Jelly Bean, which was released in June 2012, overtook its predecessor, Ice Cream Sandwich, back in May.

Google changed how it reported these statistics in April, deciding to rather show users who are “most engaged in the Android and Google Play ecosystem” by measuring those who access its app store rather than just its servers. This has influenced the figures — for example, in December last year, the stats showed that just 1.2% of devices were running Jelly Bean. These statistics also exclude devices that are using alternative app stores, like Amazon’s Kindle devices.