Android Honeycomb, first announced by Google at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2011, is now widely available across dozens of Android tablet models. As Google’s first publicly available operating system developed specifically for media tablets, Honeycomb was hotly anticipated ahead of its unveiling, but end users have seemingly not been impressed by the OS or the slates that have emerged carrying the platform. According to a recent study, Honeycomb tablets account for just 1% of Android usage. Read on for more.
Ad network Chitika analyzed hundreds of millions of impressions served to Android devices during the course of one week, and found that Gingerbread accounted for two-thirds of all Android devices. Froyo powered 28% of Android devices and Donut and Cupcake each accounted for 2% of usage. Honeycomb, which is found on all modern Android tablets, was running on just 1% of Android devices drawing traffic from Chitika’s network.
“We found that versions, Gingerbread (2.3) and Froyo (2.2) dominate all other Android versions. Together, they make up nearly 95% of total Android traffic in our network,”Chitika’s Ryan Cavanagh wrote in a post on the company’s blog. “Gingerbread is the real standout dominating the market with a 67% share. This makes sense because Gingerbread is the most recent version on mobile devices. Froyo, the version released just prior to Gingerbread owns 28% of the Android market. Although Honeycomb is a more current version than Gingerbread, it’s only available on smart tablets. Our servers see a much higher share of mobile phone traffic than we do smart tablets, (though they are gaining).”
For the time being, Google’s next-generation operating system — Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich — is found on only one device. We reviewed the Samsung Galaxy Nexus last month and found the software to be much more cohesive than earlier versions of the Android platform. As Android 4.0 makes its way to tablets in 2012, perhaps Android tablet adoption will be accelerated. In the meantime however, tablets running Honeycomb are seemingly not in high demand.
An analysis of Google’s Android platform version tracker suggests that Honeycomb tablets account for just 4.8 million of the 200 million Android devices that have been activated to date.
