Jelly Bean now on 13.6 percent Android devices, Gingerbread share declines to 45.6 percent

Google has shared the monthly Android distribution data which reveals that Jelly Bean, the latest version of Android is now on 13.6 percent Android devices.

As per data released by Google for the month of February, the percentage of devices currently running Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0.x) is more or less stable at 29 percent, a marginal decline of 0.1 percent compared to last month. As we'd seen in the previous report, Gingerbread (Android 2.x) is now below the 50 percent mark running on 45.6 percent of all Android devices as per the latest data.

Android 2.2 and 2.1 together stay slightly above the 10 percent mark, at a combined marketshare of 10.3 percent, down from 11.4 percent last month. As we've been pointing out, most of the devices running these versions of Android don't have an upgrade path, and the reduction kind of implies that people are ditching their old devices in favour of new ones.

While Jelly Bean's finally showing up on more devices, there's fragmentation within this version, with Android 4.1 accounting for 12.2 percent of the devices, and Android 4.2 being present on just 1.2 percent. The latest iteration (4.2) has only been rolled out on Nexus devices at the moment. So only 1.2 percent of all Android devices are running the latest version of the operating system.

While Apple hasn't shared official numbers for iOS 6.1 adoption, a report by Onswipe says that over 21.8 percent of iOS devices worldwide are running the latest version of Apple's OS, iOS version 6.1, merely days after its release. This is according to data tracked by Onswipe. However, it's worth pointing out that Onswipe's data is based on a rather small sample set of 13 million devices.

Irrespective of that, adoption rates of the latest version of the OS is much higher in the Apple world, thanks in no small measure to the fact there are no intermediaries between the company issuing the software upgrade and the end users. The Android world has a host of such intermediaries that exist between Google and the end-users, including the operators, and handset manufacturers themselves.