Ice Cream Sandwich hits double digits and is now on 10.9 percent of Android devices

Google has released the latest platform version numbers tonight, and things are as expected -- still slowly trending up. Before we go any further, we have to note that Jelly Bean (Android 4.1) is not on any retail devices yet and is not included in these numbers. Having said that, it's nice to see ICS finally hit double digits on its slow race to adoption. Every version lower than 4.0 saw losses since last month, and 4.0 to 4.0.4 saw an uptick of 3.8 percent as phones and tablets got their long-awaited Ice Cream Sandwich updates and phones like the HTC One series were released with the latest (at the time) version.

So what does this mean? A couple things -- OEM's still take forever to update their software, people are still using ancient hardware with cupcake on it, and the Galaxy Nexus doesn't seem to be selling enough units to harm Apple financially after all. Things may start to get more interesting in August with the Galaxy S III released in the US recently, and the Nexus 7 coming this July. 

Source: Android developers

Ice Cream Sandwich now on 7.1 percent of all Android smartphones

Over the past little while we've started to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich make its way to quite a few devices and now Google has updated their latest Android platform version statistics to give us all a better look at the rate of adoption across the board. Gingerbread is still the run away leader here with a total of 65 percent but Ice Cream Sandwich has now reached 7.1 percent of Android smartphones out there. For some perspective, that's up from the 2.9 percent reported in April.

Source: Android Developers

Google's revenue up 24 percent over 2011; stock split announced

Google this afternoon released its first-quarter 2012 earnings results. And as you can imagine, there are a lot of zeros in them. Specifically, revenue was at $10.65 billion for Q1 2012, 24 percent higher than in Q1 2011. Cash on hand at the end of March was $49.3 billion, and Google added about 600 jobs in Q1.

Additionally, Google announced what essentially is a stock split, creating a new class of non-voting capital stock that will be awarded via a dividend to existing stockholders in a one-to-one manner.

We'll be listening in on the conference call in a few minutes to see if there's any Android-specific news.

Source: Google Q1 2012 Earnings; Founders Letter

Spurt of updates brings ICS to 2.9 percent of Android devices

Google has just released an updated set of Android platform statistics for the two-week period ending April 2, 2012. These numbers show the proportion of various version of Android to have accessed the Google Play Store over the past fortnight, meaning these are devices that are being used by real people.

Here's how things looked for Android in late March and early April 2012 --

• ?Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0.x): Decent growth for ICS, as the latest version of Android increases its share from 1.6 percent of devices last month to 2.9 percent this month. This is likely due to the arrival of OTA updates for popular international phones like the HTC Sensation and Samsung Galaxy S II.
• ?Honeycomb (Android 3.x): Unchanged at 3.3 percent. We'd expect this number to fall gradually in the months ahead, as ICS slowly starts to arrive on the current crop of Honeycomb tablets.
• ?Gingerbread (Android 2.3.x): A small jump to 63.7 percent, from 62 percent last month. Clearly some devices are still in the process of being updated to Android 2.3. We can see the pace of Gingerbread's growth is starting to slow, though -- last month's growth was just under 4 points, compared to 1.7 percent this month.
• ?Froyo (Android 2.2.x): Froyo numbers continue to slowly fall away, with Android 2.2 now on just 23.1 percent of devices, down from 25.3 percent last month.
• Eclair (Android 2.1): A small drop of 0.6 percent, to 6 percent total.
• ?Donut (Android 1.6) and Cupcake (Android 1.5): Down 0.2 percent, but still active on one percent of devices. Maybe time to think about an upgrade?

For the record, here's our breakdown of last month's numbers. There's definitely a general movement towards Ice Cream Sandwich on both tablets and phones, and we expect that trend to accelerate in the next month. April will see more ICS updates for existing Gingerbread and Honeycomb devices, along with the launch of more ICS phones, including HTC's highly-anticipated One X and One S.

Source: Android Developers