It has become somewhat of a routine that every fortnight Google will update the above graph (Platform Versions) with the percentages of how many devices are running each version of Android, and then technology blogs will rush to praise or criticise Google. The last update took place on March 5th, which means the next fortnightly update should have taken place on the 19th of March. It didn’t.
It could easily be said that I’m looking too far into something that doesn’t really matter. But perhaps it does to Google. At the last update they got trashed for only having 1.6% of all Google Play-accessing devices on Android 4.0.x, the latest version of their operating system, months after launch.
On March 19th — when the last update was meant to take place — Google may have seen that the numbers for Ice Cream Sandwich had not risen to a point that they found acceptable so they didn’t make the numbers public. At around the same time Samsung was starting to push Ice Cream Sandwich to some of its 20 million+ Galaxy S IIs.
Now that Google’s next Platform Versions update is going to take place a month after the previous one, and with a large amount of Samsung Galaxy S IIs on the latest version of Android, it’s likely that we’re going to see Ice Cream Sandwich’s overall percentage at a point where Google would prefer it to be.
Then again, I could be looking too far into something, and it was just Google forgetting. But that doesn’t seem likely.
