In 2011, Android became the dominant mobile platform. At the beginning of the year, it was already leading with 36 percent of the market, but by the third quarter, it had the majority of the smartphone market — 52 percent. However, from a developer’s perspective, there’s one big problem with Android — fragmentation.
For this past year, the most popular version of Android was “Froyo” (version 2.2), which was released in May 2010. For the coming year, “Gingerbread” (version 2.3) is likely to dominate. To help developers make decisions about which versions of Android to target, view the article for charts and graphs showing which versions have become the most popular over time.