25% of Android phones are now running on Jelly Bean

The new numbers on how Android versions are distributed across the phone market are out. Data collected over a 14 day period of active phones, show that now over 25% of Android phones are running on Jelly Bean. The data was released on Android’s own portal for developers.

If you include Ice Cream Sandwich, then that total number is almost 55%. It is good news for App developers that more than half the phones are running Android ICS or higher.

Android phones have always been criticized for having a fragmented distribution. Though Android phones sales are several times more phones than say Apple sells iPhone, but a large number of them use Android 2.3.3 (Gingerbread) version.

Android really took a big step of improvement with ICS and has steadily improved since. So developers will be happy that over 25% of Android phones now run on Jelly Bean.

What’s so special about Jelly Bean?

Jelly Beans has a lot of improvements as far as features go, but the big difference is that it is usually running on high-end smartphones. These are high end phones like HTC One, Galaxy S3 (and S4 when it starts shipping) and Nexus 4 devices. People who use these devices are more likely to not just download apps but also pay of them. If more people are ready to pay of apps, that will automatically attract more app developers.

Source: Dashboards – Android Developers