Android Measuring Stick

pxldot has a great article on how Android is fairing and just how fragmented the OS is as new versions of the OS are distributed.

The problem of Android fragmentation is partially caused by the cell carriers (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint) having control over when new OS’s get distributed. It also has a lot to do with cell manufacturers being allowed to alter the base Android OS putting their own spin on it before it goes onto their devices. The latter being a big factor in slowing down the distribution of new OS’s to users.

The article shows one very interesting graph of the percentage of handsets that have the most recent version of Android:

It’s interesting to me because the percentage never exceeds 55%! So currently, about 53% of all Android handsets out there are running Gingerbread/Honeycomb (I wonder what the percentage is for each of those OS’s?) and maybe 1% to 2% are on Ice Cream Sandwich. That leaves about 45% for all the other OS’s.

In attempting to find some fragmentation info on iOS, I mostly found article discussing which OS’s app crash more frequently. Really?

I did find one site showing iOS distribution based on web impressions:

I’m disappointed that I couldn’t find more info on iOS fragmentation. I know it exists and I would love to see the number of users per iPhone and OS version.

Let’s face it, there have been 5 iPhones since 2007. iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S. 2 versions of the iPhone have been discontinued (Original and 3G). 3 versions of iOS are used by those 5 phones. iOS version 3.1.3 for the original iPhone, 4.2.1 for the 3G and 5.0.1 for the 3GS, 4 and 4S.

If someone reading this has seen some decent stats on iOS distribution, I would love to know where to find it.