It’s taken some time, but Android 4.1 Jelly Bean is finally beginning to claim a notable share of devices. Almost six months after its release, the software has been installed on 10.2% of smartphones and tablets, while Gingerbread’s share slowly diminishes. The vast majority of users are still running Gingerbread, Android 2.3, but the software share has dropped below the 50% mark for the first time in over a year.

The figures come from Google’s own Android Dashboard, which offers data from the Google Play Store, so they couldn’t be more accurate. Over the course of a two-week period, which ended on Thursday, January 3, 47.6% of Android devices accessing the Google Play Store were running Gingerbread.

Honeycomb, Android 3 that’s designed specifically for tablets, has a minuscule 1.5% share now, while Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, the first Android update to merge the smartphone and tablet user interfaces into one, claims 29.1% of the share. Amazingly, 9% of Android users are still running Android 2.2 Froyo.

Jelly Bean adoption is certainly on the rise, claiming 10.2% of the market, the largest share it’s had since its release in July 2012. That’s only going to continue rising throughout 2013 as manufacturers slowly but surely update their existing hardware, and launch new devices with Jelly Bean pre-installed.

• SourceGoogle