Android in March 2011: Froyo and Gingerbread shares are on the rise

Google has just updated the Android platform version distribution charts. Just as expected Froyo and Gingerbread market shares continue to climb, while Honeycomb is still unable to make an impact. The outdated Eclair, Donut and Cupcake continue on their march towards extinction.

Android 2.2 Froyo was the biggest gainer over the two weeks since the last Google report, climbing 2.6% to 63.9%. The two Gingerbread distributions - Android 2.3 and Android 2.3.3 also improved by a total of 0.8% and stand at 0.8% and 1.7% respectively.

And while a total market share of 2.5% sounds pretty minor you should keep in mind that this is 50% more than what Gingerbread held just a couple of weeks ago. You should also keep in mind that the hottest Gingerbread devices are only now hitting the shelves (and some haven't even done so yet) so their influence should be felt strongly in the months to come. Also we are expecting quite a lot of the well-selling handsets to get updated to Gingerbread soon (including the XPERIA X10 and the Galaxy S).

The tablet-friendly Honeycomb remains in a pretty unenviable position with its 0.2% market share. What's worse is that there was no recorded growth over the past couple of weeks, but we guess that could be expected as the Motorola XOOM is still the only device running Android 3.0 available.

We should see a notable increase in Honeycomb devices towards the end of this month when Acer throws in their Iconia Tab A100 and A500 tablets on the ring, while ASUS debuts its Eee Pad Transformer.

The second most-popular Android distribution, the 2.1 Eclair, continued its slide, losing 1.8% in two weeks to 27.2%. That trend seems to be increasing in speed as Eclair only lost 2.1% over the previous month and a half.

Cupcake on the other hand slipped 0.3% and is now running on just 2.7% of all droids. Donut is not doing much better either retaining a market share of 3.5% (compared to 4.8% from two weeks ago).

To conclude, Froyo is probably reaching its peek point and we will probably see its market share even out for a while, before it eventually gets transferred to Gingerbread and Honeycomb. Meanwhile the expected rapid growth of the two newer distributions should come at the expense of Eclair, Donut and Cupcake.

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