Android 4.x now almost 40% of the ecosystem

It's that time of the month where Google updates the platform version share numbers for Android, and the numbers for this month are much more interesting than usual because they cover the Christmas holiday week. We already have seen that Christmas was huge this year with 17 million iOS and Android devices activated on Christmas day alone, and 50 million devices over the entire week. That seems to have helped push Ice Cream Sandwich, and Jelly Bean's adoption for Android and now Android 4.x makes up almost 40% of the ecosystem.

The big winner this month was Android 4.1 Jelly Bean which jumped from 5.9% to a solid 9% of the ecosystem. Android 4.2 (aka Nexus devices) saw a more modest increase this month after doubling its share last month, up from 0.8% to 1.2%. Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich also saw a slight increase from 27.5% to 29.1%, putting the total for Android 4.x at 39.1%.

Android 3.x Honeycomb didn't see any change at all, but all older versions of Android saw decreases with Android 2.3 Gingerbread seeing the biggest drop and finally falling below 50% of the market to 47.6%. Of course, even though it has dropped that much, Gingerbread still makes up the biggest chunk of the Android ecosystem.

source: Android Platform Versions