Apple takes a dig at Android with new iOS fragmentation chart

Apple has recently added a chart on its developer website, which is in the same pie chart format used by Google to report Android users in Google Play.


As you can see in the pie chart below, 93% of its users are using iOS 6, which is the latest version, 6% are on iOS 5, which was released in 2011 and just 1% are still on earlier iOS, which was released in 2010. This was based on data collected during a 14-day period ending on June 3, 2013, just the way Google measures the data on the Android platform.

Here’s the fragmentation chart of the Android platform. As you can see, 36.4% of the users are still on Gingerbread (Android 2.3 – 2.3.2), which was released in 2010, 33% of the users are on Jelly Bean (Android 4.x.x), which is the latest version and 25.6% of the users are still on Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0.3 – 4.0.4), which was released in 2011. So a majority of Android users are still on older version of the software.

This does not include devices like the Kindle Fire and millions of devices in China than run on Android but do not use Google’s services.

By publishing data in the same format, Apple wants to highlight one of the competitive advantages of developing for the iOS platform. Fragmentation can be become a major issue for a developer who wants to use features from the latest version of the operation system.

As AppleInsider points out, the irony of the situation is that, 67% of the Android users cannot use Google’s own services like Google Now as it needs Android 4.1 or later, where as it is available to 99% of iOS users as it needs iOS 5 or later.