New device dashboard shows Android 1.5 accounts for more than half of all devices.
Google has published stats showing the penetration of different versions of its Android OS, with the aim of helping developers decide which of them to support.
The new device dashboard shows that right now, Android 1.6 is on 54.2% of Android devices, with its predecessor Android 1.5 the second most popular variant with 27.7%.
Android 2.0, which debuted in the Motorola Droid, is on 2.9% of devices, but the update to that update, 2.0.1 (still with us?) is on 14.8%. Android 1.1 brings up the rear with a measly 0.3%.
"At this point, there's little incentive to make sure a new application is backward compatible with Android 1.0 and 1.1," blogs Google's Raphael Moll.
However, it's not as simple as just supporting Android 1.5, 1.6 and 2.0. Moll points out that starting with 1.6, devices can have different screen sizes and densities (i.e. QVGA versus WVGA).
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Google plans to update the dashboard regularly to give developers the latest stats. We'd love to see them break it down by individual handsets too, but perhaps that's expecting too much.
