Gingerbread on 39% of Android devices

The newest Android platform version distribution chart was quietly updated while Apple was making its big speech today. It's showing a solid uptick in Gingerbread adoption throughout the Android ecosystem, but it also points out an annoying lack of information with the distribution chart.

According to the new numbers, Gingerbread is the big winner this month and is installed on 39% of Android devices in the wild. This isn't surprising as many devices have been getting the Gingerbread update recently. This marks a jump of 7.5% for Gingerbread over the last month. The losers, again unsurprisingly, were Froyo (2.2) which dropped from 51.2% to 45.3% and Eclair (2.0/2.1) which dropped from 13.3% to 11.7%. No real change in Cupcake or Donut, but at this point those devices aren't getting any updates. Honeycomb also saw a slight increase from 1.4% to 1.8%. 

The trouble with these numbers is in the distribution of Gingerbread versions. The chart marks Android 2.3-2.3.2 at 0.5%, and then lumps together 2.3.3-2.3.7, which amounts to 38.2%. The trouble there is that while 2.3.3 marks the major bug fix of the random reboot on Gingerbread, the major feature update was 2.3.4, which added Google Talk video chat. We'd rather see 2.3.4+ broken off from the rest in the chart, so we can get a better read on how many devices have the video chat function.