These platform figures make no sense to me

[G+_Scott Knight]

These platform figures make no sense to me. If Froyo and earlier versions of Android have 5% of the market, and Android is around 800 million devices, that would mean almost 40 million phones are still on 2.2 and below. If you think about the most popular phones in the pre-Gingerbread era (Galaxy S, Desire, Droid), all of them were upgraded to Gingerbread. So, the number of phones left on 2.2 and earlier should be very small, much much lower than 40 million, thus making the entire Android market much much smaller (200-400 million rather than 800-1000 million).

 

Suddenly, all those usage reports about how iOS dominates actual usage start making sense

http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html

[G+_Nick Webster]

Remember that a lot of Android devices are not flagships and didn't get 2.3. Also remember that 800M devices don't include actively used devices. You could have a 2.2 phone that you used for a while and then upgraded to another phone. That phone was still activated but it won't contribute to the Google Play stats.

[G+_Kevin Spitzer (JaguarXT]

Lots of users don't upgrade unless forced by carriers. Very common behavior of the average consumer.

And there are the lower cost devices that were made with 2.2 and below that never will get updated by the manufacturer or carrier. Especially true outside of USA. ?

[G+_Jagannath Moorthy]

That's precisely my point, if a device does not access Google Play, it is more likely to be a 2.2 or earlier phone. As per the reports, the sales of Android have gone up ten fold or even more (of course nothing is backed by actual numbers), so shouldn't percentage of older devices be going down a lot faster than it is? Unless the new additions are not as large as reported...

[G+_Nick Webster]

Kevin Spitzer My first device was 1.6, never got updated, my second device was 2.2, never got updated, my third device was the Nexus One, only got updated to 2.3 at the latest and now I have the Galaxy Nexus, if Google doesn't give that 4.3 I'm not going to be happy. I would always take the update if I got one but my uncle for example is using honeycomb on his tablet completely ignoring the jellybean update that his tablet has. He doesn't know what update means and what it does so he won't do it.

[G+_Nick Webster]

Jagannath Moorthy Google doesn't get activation stats for non-play devices. They also don't get usage stats for inactive play devices.

[G+_George Byers]

Google counts how many devices communicate with Google Play, so developers know what platform people are active on

[G+_Johan Appelgren]

What do you base your idea that the number of pre-2.2 devices should be small? Do you have any concrete numbers that you base this on? By your logic I could make up that that there should be a billioin billions of pre-2.2 devices making those iOS reports false. 

[G+_Jagannath Moorthy]

Johan Appelgren  Concrete numbers are non existent in the Android world even for new sales, so how can I have them? I am basing my figures of the number of activations per day, if I recall, they were around 100,000 in 2009-10 (Eclair/Froyo) when Google started talking about them and have jumped to more than 1.5 million today (mostly ICS/JB).

[G+_Max Anderson]

I'm assuming low cost prepaid phones contribute quite a bit to this. Most of Virgin Mobile's phones came with 2.2 up until just a while ago.

[G+_Johan Appelgren]

Jagannath Moorthy I read a report recently that said a lot of new cheap single core, low memory Android devices still use old android versions for performance and compatibility reasons. So I think your assumption that new activations are mostly ics/jb might be wrong. ?