I read Extremetech’s article about…
Canonical reveals Ubuntu for Android
…with great interest as someone who has used the G1, Droid, and Nexus One as a primary phone at one time or another. The phrase that caught my eye was this one: the developers have melded together the Ubuntu architecture with the Android 2.3 (Gingerbread). So, while Google is trying to push 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and with information about 5.0 (code name Jelly Bean), a chunk of the world has standardized on the aging 2.3 release.
Amazon’s Kindle Fire, the best selling Android tablet, is based on a fork of Android OS 2.3 too. And, according to Google’s own data, 58.6% of all Android devices that have accessed the Android Market in the past two weeks ran a variant of 2.3. This does not, by the way, count Kindle Fire devices since the Fire does not have access to the Android Market. So, the percentage including Kindle Fire devices probably pushes the percentage past 60% of all Android devices.
Meanwhile, the tablet only Android 3.x (Honeycomb) accounts for a meager 3.4% of Android devices accessing the Market. And, 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) accounts for merely 1%. This means that 95.6% of all Android devices which access the Android Market in the last two weeks is running OS 2.3 or older. It is really beginning to look like Android OS 2.3 is going to be Google’s Windows XP – the version that dominates and will not die.