In September 2008, the first Android phone the HTC G 1 was introduced with the Android OS 1.0 and with a few third party apps. This Android OS has been the forerunner to a wide variety of operating systems developed by the Android open source community with a phenomenal number of apps. Smoothing out the problems in the Android OS brought about the much better and well accepted 1.5 OS and 1.6 OS. As various manufacturers using various types of hardware, at different stages of development were in the race for a better and better product, Android 2.0 was released. Android 2.0 and 2.1 versions of the OS were then the most popular with a wide variety of smartphone manufacturers till mid 2010.
Barely had quite a few manufacturers launched or announcing launches took shape, the Android community and Google announced Android 2.2 nicknamed the Froyo. With each upgrade came a new set of problems and a new set of demands and more expectations from users. While the iPhone and RIM Blackberry systems kept introducing more and more features, the pressure kept building on the Android community to be quick in developing newer versions of the OS. Introducing an OS is a cumbersome task of management between the developers, manufacturers and the carriers. The pressure is always there on the carriers to be able to provide the features after testing the same and matching the requirements.
The end of 2010 and early 2011 also saw the next few versions namely, the Android 2.3 – Gingerbread OS and the Android 3.0 Honeycomb OS being announced and launched. It is hence, not very surprising, that more than half the phones operating in the market, at user level are Froyo based operating systems. Froyo introduced in May 2010, today is operational in February 2011 on about 52% of the Android-based units. About 30 to 35% of Android-based phones are still operational on Android 2.1, with about 10% using Android 1.6, about 7% using 1.5 and less than 0.5% use Android Gingerbread.
