
Android Jelly Bean passes 10% adoption and Gingerbread finally falls under 50% - Pr0
http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/01/03/android-jelly-bean-passes-10-adoption-ics-nears-30-and-gingerbread-finally-falls-under-50/?fromcat=all
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jasonkostempski
Those numbers must include the Meep! devices kids got for Christmas (Android
4.0). I don't know how many units they sold but I suspect just about all of
those have been or will be returned [1]. Just about the only thing I could do
on it was connect to Google Play.

[1] Here's their 'Hot News' page full of apologies
<http://www.meeptablet.com/us/hotnews.asp>

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enraged_camel
It is really frustrating to see all the Android fanboys downvoting you.

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radley
It's because he's making a cheap shot at a cheap product and contributes
nothing to the topic.

UPDATE: there are hundreds of "no-name" Android devices running 4.0, including
those HDMI TV sticks you can get in China. Most likely the brand he mentioned
didn't make a dent in the statistics.

~~~
enraged_camel
I didn't interpret it that way. He brings up a very valid point: it is near
useless to talk about the rate of adoption for Android versions because of the
large variety of devices that use it. He points to an example of such a
device.

edit to respond to your update: maybe the particular device did not make a
dent on it, but you said it yourself: there are a gazillion devices running
Android, and many new sales were made over the holidays. We have no idea if
the increase in the percentage of new versions was due to new sales or
upgrades of existing devices.

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radley
Naturally it would be both (upgrades & new devices).

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radley
85% of our users on our biggest selling app (500k+) are 4.0 & up.

UPDATE:

4.0: 35%, 4.1: 31%, 4.2: 19%.

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rkudeshi
Paid or free app? What kind of app?

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radley
Paid, widgets.

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Steko
Napkin math says that ICS+ users are 8.75 times more likely to purchase than
pre ICS users.

Interestingly this is the sort of magnitude of difference we sometimes see
between iOS and Android app stores.

It would also be interesting to see the number for a fairly popular free app.
That could give you an estimate on what percentage of users buys a low end
Android phone as a feature phone replacement.

Recap on a recent conjecture of mine: the difference in paid content from iOS
to Android is primarily due to the number of credit cards Google has on file
moreso than the number of people using Android as a feature phone replacement
(often claimed to be the big reason for dollar disparity between the stores).

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radley
We also have an old free app made on sdk 2.3 and backwards compatible to 2.1.
That one is 62% 2.x users.

~~~
Steko
That seems fairly close to the general population breakdown (59.2% are pre-
Honeycomb and 62% wouldn't have been too long ago).

Just one data point but it seems in line with credit cards being the issue not
people who don't use the app store (if it was more of the latter you'd expect
something like a 2:1 high end buy ratio for free apps but it looks just like
the whole population).

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reidmain
The adoption rate of the latest version of Android may not be that high but
does anyone know how MANY devices are running 4.0 or higher?

I routinely tout the high adoption rate of iOS devices and how it justifies
increasing the minimum iOS versions for apps because you still have a massive
potential userbase. But because Android has more phones in the marketplace
than iOS is it possibly now for developers to make Android 4.0 the minimum and
still get a respected number of users?

~~~
chimeracoder
> But because Android has more phones in the marketplace than iOS is it
> possibly now for developers to make Android 4.0 the minimum and still get a
> respected number of users?

There's no easy answer to that question because it depends on what your target
use case actually _is_.

Remember that the goal of Android is to be a universal platform for hardware,
which means that the target devices for Android are much more heterogeneous
than iOS - and therefore the intended use case as well.

I use an out-of-date Android device as a portable music player and an up-to-
date one as my regular phone. Even that's not that wildly different if you
start imagining people running Android on their household appliances.

So, in my case, even though I technically still run Gingerbread, I'm fine with
Android applications requiring 4.2+, since the only device that runs
Gingerbread is essentially a single-purpose dedicated device. I imagine we'll
start to see more of this behavior in the future.

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reidmain
"I imagine we'll start to see more of this behavior in the future."

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by this. Do you mean consumers will use/buy
older Android devices for very specific tasks?

I think the exact opposite of this will happen. Your average consumer is not
going to want to have multiple devices. They just want to carry their phone
around and have it do everything for them.

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chimeracoder
> Your average consumer is not going to want to have multiple devices.

Your "average consumer" already _does_. The point is that Android in three
years will be serving an even wider range of devices and household appliances.

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reidmain
Ah I see the disconnect. You're talking about Android running my microwave. I
was thinking about consumer electronics like phones and tablets.

While I agree a lot more devices will be running a more complicated OS with
increased capabilities in the I future I don't think it is a foregone
conclusion that it will run Android. Android is primarily used on phones,
tablets and TVs because of explicit design choices made. Perhaps they will
position themselves as a generic OS for electronic devices but they have some
work to do before that can happen.

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astrodust
Pie charts are useless enough. Pie charts with varying shades of green and
nonsense names are even more useless.

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paramsingh
Would you mind explaining why pie charts are useless? Honest question.

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DanBC
In general it's hard to know what a chunk of the pie chart means. You get a
very simple glance that one chunk is bigger, and another chunk is much bigger.
But looking at that chart: How big is Eclair & Older compared to Honeycomb?

That chart is ordered by release; you start reading it at "3 o'clock" on the
right hand side, and work clockwise.

Luckily they've labled each chunk of the pie. Normally they'd just have a key
alongside it. People would have to match a shade of green (or some other
color) to a key to try to get the numbers.

Pie charts do have uses. But they're just hard to read and present information
in a weird way.

([http://pol.illinoisstate.edu/jpda/charts/chart%20tips/Charts...](http://pol.illinoisstate.edu/jpda/charts/chart%20tips/Chartstip%202.htm))

([http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/the-problem-with-
pie-c...](http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/the-problem-with-pie-charts/))

(<http://www.stevefenton.co.uk/Content/Pie-Charts-Are-Bad/>)

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nsomaru
I wonder if anyone who develops for Android could shed some light on the
difficulties they encounter when developing for a fragmented platform?

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cryptoz
Why not ask a web developer instead? Android is a lot less fragmented than the
world wide web.

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gte910h
While this is true, owning and testing all the android devices is a lot harder
than having a system with many web browsers on it.

Also asking customers to upgrade is usually downloading new software for
websites, but is buying new hardware for many android users (as there is no
released update nor will there ever be for their devices)

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chimeracoder
> a system with many web browsers on it.

Try _multiple_ systems (multiple operating systems), with combinatorially many
possibilities for the interesections of {operating system, browser type,
browser version, screen size, resolution}.

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gte910h
Which is exactly the same situation for android. And android is a far smaller
area so tricks like just using the center third in both directions for large
screens doesn't work.

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chimeracoder
> Which is exactly the same situation for android.

Not at all - the difference between any two Android devices is _far_ less than
the difference between any two potential viewers of a website.

> And android is a far smaller area so tricks like just using the center third
> in both directions for large screens doesn't work.

Android also has an extensive set of well-defined guidelines for layout and
constructing applications - the more you rely on the core API to handle these
tasks, the more portable your app will be across Android devices.

That's a lot more than can be said for browser rendering in the general case.

