Two months in, Jelly Bean only represents 1% of all Android traffic

Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, which was open-sourced back in July, is doing very well, if this headline from Chitika Insights is read out of context: “Android 4.1 Jelly Bean Adoption Jumps 1500% in Two Months.” Thankfully, we’re here to put things into perspective, and the status quo really isn’t that great: Jelly Bean was at just 1.2% in August, according to Google’s latest numbers.

Chitika’s figures are slightly different, as the firm measures the rate of adoption for the mobile platform. The company compiled two months’ worth of Android Web traffic, sampling “hundreds of millions of mobile ad impressions” from its ad network. The Insights team then calculated and compared the percentage of traffic for the platform with overall Android traffic since June 30, 2012. The graph below shows the results:

As you can see, Android 4.1’s market share based on Web traffic shot up to 0.87 percent by the end of July, and only continued to grow to a high point of 1.47 percent by the end of August. September isn’t over yet, and Chitika wouldn’t provide a percentage point for where it’s graph ends. There have been slight dips, but we can expect the overall trend to be upward.

Nevertheless, Jelly Bean won’t be the one to fix Android’s fragmentation problem. As Chitika puts it: “With Jelly Bean’s rollout to only a select set of devices, it’s unlikely that this version of Google’s operating system will generate adoption rates to put a dent in this ongoing issue – top of mind for mobile app and Web developers.”

So, what’s the good news? Well, we know that the adoption of new Android versions is really slow because updates are being rolled out for current devices very slowly. As such, the flipside of the fact that Jelly Bean is still being pushed out (My friend’s Facebook’s status yesterday was: “finally got the official jelly bean update for my Galaxy Nexus! its faster!”) is that we can expect its share of the pie to increase more rapidly over the next few months. That being said, it’s not going to be at 50 percent any time soon.

See also: This script lets you root any Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich or Android 4.1 Jelly Bean device

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