Android Fragmentation: The Last 6 Months

A lot is made of Android’s undeniable fragmentation and the difficulties it presents for its developers. To get a sense of how fragmentation has progressed, we’re going to be looking at four reports that Google has made available over the last 6 months.

You can find the current data for these ‘Platform Version’ reports here.

A stacked chart of the data gives us a little better sense of the progression.

It’s worth noting how quickly the manufacturers who adopted 2.0 and 2.0.1 have made the move to 2.1. On the other side, there’s been little, if any, progress in moving 1.5 and 1.6 phones to 2.0+. Even though 1.5 and 1.6 have dropped their combined percentage from 69.6 to 62.1 from 4/2/2010 to 5/17/2010, this can mostly be attributed towards sales of new units with the 2.1 operating system on it.

Next up, we’ll most likely see another update from Google around the end of June or early July. Don’t be surprised if this update shows a huge jump towards 2.1 and huge reduction in 1.6 with phones such as HTC’s Hero and Eris set to get updates during that time.