Android's Jelly Bean Now on 10 Percent of Devices

When talking about Android, it seems everyone always wants the newest and the best operating system. One of the big problems with Android is that they don’t roll out the newest and best operating system for all of their devices.

Of course Apple does the same thing, not offering up iOS 6.0 to older iPads and iPhones, but it is more obvious when talking about Android because of the catchy desert names they give their operating system updates. 

Jelly Bean (Android 4.1) replaced Ice Cream Sandwich as the best and the brightest operating system about six months ago, and despite the OS being offered on a wide range of devices, a new report shows that Jelly Bean is currently only running on about 10 percent of Android smartphones and tablets.

The Android developer blog shed light on those numbers at the end of last week, with the data being collected from all devices that have accessed the Google Play store over a two-week period that officially ended on January 3. 

While that doesn't seem to be a huge number, it is up by as much as 3.5 percent from July 1, when devices running Jelly Bean were sitting at just 6.7 percent.

Jelly Bean's predecessor, Ice Cream Sandwich (officially Android 4.0), is still being run on about 29 percent of Android users – up 1.7 percent from the July 1 study. The oldest operating system, Android 1.5 (cupcake), has apparently been almost completely phazed out, with just 0.1 percent of Android users still “boasting” that operating system. 

Gingerbread (Android 2.3) is still the most popular operating system among Android smartphones and tablets. The system is still showing that 47.6 percent of Android users have that operating system on their devices – down a bit from July when just over 50 percent were using that version.

Jelly Bean was rolled out officially last June, with a number of improvements to the operating system, including better sizing of icons on the home screen and more efficient computing.