Google’s Android and Apple iOS have both gained considerable popularity as mobile operating systems over the last few years. As of now, both are duking it out for winning over as many users as they can, among the 76.8 million smartphone owners in the US. So far, both have been going neck-to-neck, with iOS winning in the categories of click through rate (CTR) and effective cost-per-mile (eCPM). The former stands for the percentage of occurrences of an ad that get clicked on by visitors, whereas the latter refers to the revenue earned by a particular developer for every 1,000 instances of their advertisements.

Android is not lying too far behind, either. This operating system wins over its competitors in terms of Global Fill Rate (GFR), which essentially applies to the number of ad impressions that are occupied by advertisements, and average app life cycle, which essentially refers to the number of months for which individual apps are downloaded by visitors from the app store. (more…)

Is it just a miscalculation? Hold-on…nope, it’s definite – Android OS “Gingerbread” 2.3 features in less than 1% of the total Android smartphone users worldwide!

But, why is this so…?

Gingerbread has some great features. It has an improved on-screen keypad, which is much faster and facilitates intuitive typing. Moreover, Gingerbread allows you to kill misbehaving apps, gives you a greater insight into what’s running in the background, and also gives you the option to view and control all the app downloads from your browser.

But, in spite of all these amazing features, there aren’t many Android users who have this version of the OS running in their phones. Is it because Android market is mimicking the wildly varied PC market before it? Maybe…may not be! But, something which can be generally agreed upon is as follows:

Since there’s heavy fragmentation in the Android market and wireless device manufacturers also add their customization features to Android phones, users have to wait till device manufacturers release their reworked versions of this new OS.

Mobile strategists and market researchers believe that this is the prime reason behind the low user base of Gingerbread. Though, there are ways to unofficially update your Android smartphone with a newer OS version, but sadly not many people know about them.

Let’s have a look at the stats for Android OS usage across the different versions:

• Android OS 1.5 – 3.9%

• Android OS 1.6 – 6.3%

• Android OS 2.1 – 31.4%

• Android OS 2.2 – 57.6%

• Android OS 2.3 – 0.8%

There you go…these are recent figures! But, not to worry…as the days pass, these figures are sure to improve as smartphone manufacturers release their own versions of Gingerbread!