Android in May 2011: Gingerbread more than doubles

We just got the updated Android platform version distribution chart and it shows that the latest smartphone edition of the Google OS is gaining momentum. Android 2.3 and 2.3.3 Gingerbread have more than doubled their total market share and are rapidly closing on 2.1 Eclair for the second spot.

The first Gingerbread build, 2.3, hasn’t improved dramatically (just 0.1%) as it was simply skipped by most manufacturers, but it's the newer and better revision, the V2.3.3, that surged 5.1% in just a month.

Seeing that the dominant Android 2.2 Froyo actually lost some ground this month we can see that some of the Gingerbread progress is due to updates, but a host of new smartphones released over the past month has helped too.

Anyway, even after the 1.3% slip, Froyo is still running on almost two thirds of the droids out there and it will remain like that for a while given the 43.4% lead over the second most popular distribution.

What’s more, that second placed Android version at the moment is the outdated 2.1 Eclair, which is, as expected, declining much faster than Froyo. In May Eclair lost 3.3%, which is pretty big and that’s more than it lost in April so the trend is picking up pace.

The two oldest still active Android distributions, 1.5 Cupcake and 1.6 Donut, are also continuing on their way down, losing another 0.4% and 0.5% respectively. They now have 4.4% of market share between them so we suspect they will be long forgotten by the time Android Ice Cream Sandwich comes out. As a matter of fact, Cupcake will probably be there by the end of the summer.

Finally, we come upon the tablet-friendly Android Honeycomb, which is finally starting to make its presence felt. Its 3.0 release has kept a 0.3% market share, but in just two weeks after its announcement the 3.1 build has matched that, doubling the total Honeycomb market share in the process.

With the Asus Eee Pad Transformer availability promised to improve and the two ultra-slim Galaxy Tab slates (8.9 and 10.1) just about to hit the shelves, Honeycomb still hasn’t revealed its full potential.

Also the Gingerbread share is improving much faster than expected, so we'll probably see it breathing down Eclair’s neck as soon as the end of June. Froyo is too beyond its peak, but we don’t expect too rapid a shrink in its market share for at least another month or two.

The future of Android 2.2 Froyo will mostly depend on carriers providing timely updates for their most popular handsets. Here’s hoping that Gingerbread will be in the lead by the time the world gets to taste an Ice Cream Sandwich from the Google freezer.