Google has released the Android platform distribution numbers for the two weeks till March 4th, and it is pretty encouraging to see that Gingerbread – the most popular Android version ever – has finally taken a dip beneath 45%, while the percentage of devices running Jelly Bean continues its slow but steady climb.

Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) has taken another very small dip – it has fallen 0.4% from 29.0% to 28.6% in a matter of two weeks, which isn’t that great but certainly better than the 0.1% decrease it saw last time. Gingerbread continues to remain the dominant Android version in use (mostly because of the inability of Gingerbread-running hardware to be updated to ICS), but a drop from 45.6% to 44.2% shows that its fall might continue to escalate in the coming months. Froyo and Eclair together take up 9.5% share of the total pie, while Donut refuses to die by still taking up 0.2%.

However, Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, which brought Android’s performance and smoothness to levels never seen before, managed a big 2.7% rise from 12.2% to 14.9%. That’s an impressive climb up the charts and bodes well for the future. Android 4.2 currently commands 1.6% of devices, which is mostly Google’s own Nexus devices, but we should see it rise as manufacturers start rolling out Android 4.2 updates to devices launched in the latter half of 2012 and in 2013.

So there it is folks. Android remains as fragmented as naysayers of the OS like to call it (they are right to some extent), but if the latest distribution numbers are anything to go by, a majority of users may soon be on Android 4.0+. Which is great, since Android 4.0 and later are the only versions of Android worth using in our opinion.

Check the full details of the distribution numbers at the source link.

Source: Android Developers