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We’ve long bemoaned the Android rollout process, but now comes good news, of sorts. Ice Cream Sandwich — the latest version of Android — is now used on 7.1 per cent of devices, according to Google’s stats.
This is up from the 5 per cent a month ago. But it still pales in comparison to Gingerbread, which accounts for 65 per cent of all Android devices. So ICS still has a long way to go. The figures become all the more unimpressive when you consider Android Jelly Bean is due for release in the next couple of months.
There is a caveat. These figures record Android devices which access the Google Play online store for apps and games, so they’re not 100 per cent accurate. But they’re about as close as we’re going to get.
More bad news if you were hoping Ice Cream Sandwich would become standard anytime soon — Gingerbread actually increased its market share slightly since last month. So it looks like ICS is a long way off topping the charts.
This is a little disappointing considering ICS is about six months old now, and as we say, about to be surpassed by Jelly Bean. Still, it is an improvement on how the year started for ICS, with it appearing on less than 1 per cent of devices. The whole palaver over the rollout for the Samsung Galaxy S2 turned off a lot of customers. One engineer thinks waiting five months for the update is perfectly reasonable. And the real kicker? Ice Cream Sandwich could even make some Android devices worse.
Are you still waiting for Ice Cream Sandwich? How long do you think is reasonable to have to wait? And what are you hoping for from Jelly Bean? Let me know in the comments, or over on our Facebook page.
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