Google has adjusted the way it counts an active Android phone user, in a bid to provide developers and marketers with a more accurate measure of its audience.
Previously, an Android phone was counted the second it touched Google’s servers. Now a phone is counted only when it accesses the Google Play Store.
Publishing stats user the new metric, Google revealed that Jelly Bean, the “latest” version of Google’s mobile OS, is on one out of every four Android phones that have the Google Play Store installed.
Gingerbread, which is now 27 months old, is on roughly four out of even ten Android devices.
However, by measuring activations via a first visit to the Play Store, Google will miss Android devices being sold in countries like China don’t have Google services installed. Amazon’s Kindle Fire is also an Android device that isn’t counted by Google, as it only provides access to its own Amazon App Store.
The Google Play Developer Console also provides detailed statistics about your users’ devices. Those stats may help you prioritize the device profiles for which you optimize your app.
This page provides information about the relative number of devices that share a certain characteristic, such as Android version or screen size. This information may help you prioritize efforts for supporting different devices.
Each snapshot of data represents all the devices that visited the Google Play Store in the prior 14 days.
Key findings below:
Platform Versions
This section provides data about the relative number of devices running a given version of the Android platform.
Screen Sizes and Densities
This section provides data about the relative number of devices that have a particular screen configuration, defined by a combination of screen size and density. To simplify the way that you design your user interfaces for different screen configurations, Android divides the range of actual screen sizes and densities into several buckets as expressed by the table below.
Read the full announcement here
