Jelly Bean now on 50 percent of Android devices

Android Jelly Bean has seen a massive surge in the usage charts over recent months, and is now on more than half of Android devices.

The first version of Android Jelly Bean, version 4.1, first appeared more than a year ago in July 2012. It’s taken since then for the OS to make its way to more than half of all Android devices.

Of course, that’s a massive achievement when you consider how slow its progress has been up to now. Back in July we reported that Jelly Bean had finally overtaken Android 2.3 Gingerbread as the dominant iteration of Google’s mobile OS with a combined 38 percent share of the market.

The figure for all three of the versions that make up Jelly Bean (4.1, 4.2 and 4.3) as of November 1 is 52.1 percent, according to Google. That means there’s been a massive 14 percent increase over the past four months.

This is pretty impressive, especially when you consider that Gingerbread is now trailing in second place on just 26.3 percent (see chart below). A large part of this dramatic swing can be attributed to the majority of Android manufacturers adopting Jelly Bean as their default out-of-the-box OS.

Of course, because these figures rely on access to the Google Play Store, any devices running on Android 2.1 Eclair and below are not counted. However, Google reckons that such devices only represent about 1 percent of all Android devices, so this is a pretty accurate polling system overall.

Still, this hard-fought victory for Google has to be tempered by the fact that Jelly Bean is no longer the most current version of Android. That honour now belongs to Android 4.4 KitKat, which was launched last week alongside the Google Nexus 5.

It’s hoped that KitKat’s uptake will be considerably quicker than previous versions of Android thanks to its lightweight design, which has been specifically targeted at low-end devices.

Next, read our pick of the best Android phones of 2013.