Android Jelly Bean passes 10% adoption and Gingerbread finally falls under 50%

http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/01/03/android-jelly-bean-passes-10-adoption-ics-nears-30-and-gingerbread-finally-falls-under-50/?fromcat=all

by Pr0 • 14 years ago

30 49 14 years ago

thenextweb.com

nsomaru• 14 years ago

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

cryptoz• 14 years ago

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

gte910h2• 14 years ago

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)

valgaze2• 14 years ago

Seems like a crucial distinction is that you can ask a user to use, upgrade, or install a different browser but not so easily ask them to get a new phone

OriginalSyn• 14 years ago

Generally speaking you don't need to own and test all devices, the emulator does just fine. There are a few quirks here and there but as cryptoz alludes to I've never had more headaches than trying to support all the versions of IE and modern browsers.

krschultz• 14 years ago

There are pretty major differences between pre Ice Cream Sandwich and post Ice Cream Sandwich. My app is almost entirely Fragments, the Action Bar, rich notifications. All of these things didn't exist in 2.2 or 2.3.

Thankfully between Google's support libraries and Action Bar Sherlock most of it can be papered over. I haven't had too much trouble with it so far.

radley8• 14 years ago

We don't use fragments too much since they're so incomplete. We use ABS for everything.

Do you support < 4.0?

radley8• 14 years ago

Our best-selling app is a widget app so we probably have to contend with the most fragmentation: OS, screen size, device UI layer, device launchers, indie launchers, custom grid sizes, and mods. Then double that for screen orientations.

OS differences, screen sizes, and layouts are handled by a lot of XML resources. Memory limitations is a big problem in older devices and OSes. Flexible layout design is also a challenge since Google & Samsung/HTC have opposing ideas of how big a widget should appear.

Between Mike & I, we have 30+ devices for testing. I have the majority since I work on the UI and need to see how our widgets look for every possible layout. We don't need to buy one of every device made, we just cover new screen types (Droid DNA), platforms (Kindle Fire), and OSes (Nexus 4). We also make sure we have any standout devices (Google Nexus, Galaxy S3). We've been collecting phones & tablets since 2010, so we're pretty well covered for older devices.

We don't mod or force-update our devices; we remain stock. When a major device updates, we update too. We don't support mods/ROMs since it's too difficult to solve bugs on moving targets.

Most users understand Android has been changing exponentially over the past two years. The Galaxy Nexus is the tipping point. Anything made prior is simply outdated. Android 2.3 is our minimum supported OS, but we leave 2.2 open for those willing to try. Similarly, a few top developers are making new apps that are strictly 4.x & up.

reidmain3• 14 years ago

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?

chimeracoder4• 14 years ago

> 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.

reidmain3• 14 years ago

"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.

KaoruAoiShiho• 14 years ago

I seriously doubt this is a valid concern right now. In the next 3 years, yes, today, no.

bad_user• 14 years ago

The problem with Gingerbread is that it's good enough for a majority of users, including me.

When I upgraded from Gingerbread to Jelly, I liked the improvements a lot, but it wasn't enough to justify the decreased battery life. Granted I'm talking about a Galaxy S, with Jelly coming from Cyanogenmod, which is known to have battery issues because of shitty drivers.

So I'm just waiting for a phone upgrade when my contract expires. My next phone is going to be a Nexus, because that's the only phone guaranteed to receive supported upgrades for major versions. On the other hand, my Gingerbread has served me extremely well, which is why I don't really feel the need to upgrade, otherwise I would have done it already.

All users are going to upgrade to Jelly or higher eventually, because contracts expire and batteries die.

mtgx• 14 years ago

Should be pretty easy to calculate - 40% out of 500 million or so, so about 200 million devices have 4.0 or higher.

jasonkostempski• 14 years ago

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

w1ntermute• 14 years ago

I've never even heard of this device. It sounds like a waste of money when a Nexus 7 is just $50 more. Did it even have a substantial number of sales?

textminer• 14 years ago

Seemed unfortunately successful in its advertising. Have a brother in first grade who is a champion at using my iPhone and iPad to play games and look up dinosaur pictures and videos. Suggested to my stepmom he get an iPad mini or Nexus 7 for Christmas, but she had already bought him a MEEP (at his request). What a shame. Kids can (and should) learn real computing devices. Giving them locked-down, "child-friendly" devices is a disservice to both them and the society they'll one day be adults in.

( - Pretty sure that learning Logo, QBasic, DOS, and Telnet/Winsock during grade school in 90's is the only reason I'm an employed programmer now.)

enraged_camel4• 14 years ago

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

radley8• 14 years ago

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.

jrockway• 14 years ago

You're frustrated about a vote score you can't see? I think you should take a deep breath and step away from HN for a couple hours. Or perhaps try smiling :)

DanBC2• 14 years ago

Downvotes normally correct themselves after a few hours. It really isn't worth talking about them.

Unfortunately you used the f word, so you may get some downvotes.

mwilcox• 14 years ago

By the looks of it that 'Meep' tablet doesn't use Google Play. So no, it won't be included in the numbers in the article.

radley8• 14 years ago

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

UPDATE:

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

rkudeshi• 14 years ago

Paid or free app? What kind of app?

radley8• 14 years ago

Paid, widgets.

astrodust2• 14 years ago

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

paramsingh• 14 years ago

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

alayne• 14 years ago

Pie charts are stupid because the shapes you want to compare are rotated in space. You can't distinguish close values. It's better to use a normal bar/column chart where the comparison only occurs in one dimension (height of the bar).

DanBC2• 14 years ago

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://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/the-problem-with-pie-c...)

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

astrodust2• 14 years ago

Two specific reasons:

It's very hard to judge the relative size of various wedges, especially when they're not adjacent and one is significantly larger than the other.

Secondly, the labels are usually sufficiently removed from the data that you need to look back and forth several times to decode it, if you can even be bothered.

Here's a nearly useless pie chart: http://insights.chitika.com/uploads/screenshot-1.png

Here's a much more meaningful chart that tells a story: http://static.arstechnica.net/2012/04/02/firefox-adoption-20...

Android Jelly Bean passes 10% adoption and Gingerbread finally falls under 50%

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