Google has followed our lead and decided to begin publishing the percent of devices that are running different versions of Android. The new device dashboard will be regularly updated to reflect deployment of new Android platforms. They also plan to expand the dashboard to include other information like devices per screen size and so on.
Data collected during two weeks ending on 12/09/2009. Click to enlarge.
The following points were published on the official Android developers blog:
- At this point, there’s little incentive to make sure a new application is backward compatible with Android 1.0 and Android 1.1.
- Close to 30% of the devices are running Android 1.5. To take advantage of this significant install base, you may consider support for Android 1.5.
- Starting with Android 1.6, devices can have different screen densities & sizes. There are several devices out there that fall in this category, so make sure to adapt your application to support different screen sizes and take advantage of devices with small, low density (e.g QVGA) and normal, high density (e.g. WVGA) screens. Note that Android Market will not list your application on small screen devices unless its manifest explicitly indicates support for “small” screen sizes. Make sure you properly configure the emulator and test your application on different screen sizes before uploading to Market.
- A new SDK for Android 2.0.1 was released two weeks ago. All Android 2.0 devices will be updated to 2.0.1 before the end of the year, so if your application uses features specific to Android 2.0, you are encouraged to update it to take advantage of the latest Android 2.0.1 API instead.
These numbers are pretty close to what we found with a slightly larger number of Android 1.6 devices. T-Mobile is the only United States carrier with phones running Android 1.6 (G1 and myTouch 3G) so we can see how important the 4th largest carrier is to Android. Verizon is the only U.S. carrier with a phone running Android 2.x so we can see they make up around 18% of devices.
Finally, we have Android 1.5, which is a combination of devices from Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon. Sprint has announced their two Android phones will receive Android 2.x sometime in 1H 2010 and Verizon has also promised to update the Droid Eris from Android 1.5.
We are still waiting to see what T-Mobile will do with four Android phones.
Related Posts
About The Author
Follow on Twitter Subscribe
Taylor Wimberly
Taylor is the founder of Android and Me. He loves playing with all kinds of gadgets, but most importantly cell phones. His other hobbies include cooking (BBQ hero!), politics, football, and watching every MMA event possible.
10 Comments
is this fragentation us only or does it include the worldwide fragmentation?
its the worldwide fragmentation … so your provider calculation is a little ‘faulty’ i guess …
This site access Android market access
Market stats are more useful for a developer than http stats
Just curious. How many people have received the Android 2.0.1 update?
I’ve had my Moto Droid for almost a month and still haven’t received any notifications from Verizon. I know you can do the update manually, but I’d rather wait for the OTA method.
You need to add in world-wide distribution before patting Verizon on the back for fielding “around 18%” of Android devices.
Just goes to show that http visits are not the be-all end-all. You were way off in your 2.0 numbers to even with 2.0.1 thrown in they are still way off. More so than your 1.6 numbers which you reference as being “slightly” off.
Out of interest, how does the UK or EU region pan out? I’m a UK user of a Hero on the Orange network, and it’s running 1.5. We’ve had no word of any potential updates yet…
While TMobile hasn’t said anything about their G1 or myTouch, Samsung has said they will be coming out with an update for the Behold II.