The newest figures from the Android Developers Dashboards, released on April 1st but apparently no kind of April Fool’s Day joke, confirm that KitKat, Google’s latest version of its Android OS, is steadily carving out a bigger and bigger slice of the Android market pie, now at 5.3 percent of the total user base, compared to only 1.8 percent in early February. Meanwhile, the different versions of Jelly Bean now occupy 61.4 percent in all of the user base, with Ice Cream Sandwich at another 14.3 percent, yielding a total uptake of Android OS 4+ versions of 81 percent.

The demise of the older OS 2.x versions of Android is apparently accelerating. Gingerbread, still at 20 percent in early February, is now down to 17.8 percent, while Froyo, the oldest version of the OS which still connects to the Google Play Store, has fallen to just 1.1 percent, about the same level as all the versions of Android that preceded it, according to Google.

This is positive news for Google’s push to transition its users onto the newer versions of its software, and onto higher-end handsets. Clearly its manufacturer partners are getting the message. It’s a similar story on screen sizes, where “Normal” dimensions of at least 470dp x 320dp now occupy 79.2 percent of the market, and smaller sizes only 8.1 percent.

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