With all of the hype surrounding the debut of Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone last fall, you'd think the updated version of Google's mobile software would be on a majority of Android devices by now. But that's far from reality.
Numbers from Chitika, a mobile advertising network, show that Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) is only available on slightly more than 1 percent of Android devices. That's right, 1 percent! That's barely more than devices still operating on the earliest versions of Android – the equally yummy-sounding Donut and Cupcake, according to PCMag.
Chitika says Gingerbread (version 2.3), the most recent Android update for smartphones prior to the release of ICS, is the most common version of the OS, on nearly two-thirds of Android devices. Froyo (v 2.2) is next, at 22 percent. Honeycomb (v 3.0), the tablet-centric version of the mobile OS, comprises slightly more than 3 percent of all Android devices out there. Ice Cream Sandwich combines the smartphone and tablet operating systems into one.
Fragmentation is a major reason for the delays in rolling out ICS to more smartphones and tablets. There are dozens of manufacturers offering Android-based devices that are sold by numerous wireless carriers, resulting in a wide variety of release dates for updates, as Chitika pointed out:
"This inherent diversity of products may make Android's strength perpetually its weakness. It has taken steps to overcome it, but if these steps will ever be enough to get past the variegation built into such an open system is something we will have to see in time," PCMag quoted Chitika as saying.
A report last week offered more insight into the delay of ICS rollouts.
Google acknowledged in early January that less than 1 percent of Android phones were running ICS, so the number hasn't improved much in the past six weeks.
