Gingerbread Devices Bring in More Revenue than Jelly Bean Devices, Is this a Bad Thing for KitKat?

Google recently released KitKat, which is a pretty nice update to Android. And it’s also Google’s next attempt at keeping fragmentation down, by slimming the Android memory footprint in Android 4.4. Now it all sounds like great news right? Well not all of it is. As we all know, most of the Android users out there don’t really care much about updates, currently only 52% of Android users are on Jelly Bean While Gingerbread is at 24.1%. Remember now, Gingerbread is a 3-year-old version of Android now.

Now the ARPU is the interesting part. As Tapjoy points out, Gingerbread devices are bringing in, on average, about $1.60 per user. in October of 2013, Compared to $1.20 i September 2012. But then when comparing it to Jelly Bean devices which is sitting at $1.57 average revenue per user in October of 2013, and $1.63 in September of 2012, it looks pretty sad and not too optimistic for Android’s newest version, KitKat.

Usually the newer versions of Android will be bringing in more revenue on average, then the older versions. Which makes it a bit odd that Gingerbread is so high. It leaves us wondering, why is it so high? Is it because Gingerbread users are buying more apps, games, movies, magazines, etc., from the Play Store? Who knows. While the rise is good news for Android developers, it’s still odd and not good news for developers that aren’t making their apps compatible down to Android 2.3 – Gingerbread. Developers may want to look into supporting Gingerbread and up instead of just ICS or Jelly Bean and up. While KitKat is getting pushed out to more and more devices rather quickly, those devices weren’t running Gingerbread, so I’d expect to see the market share of Jelly Bean go down as KitKat rises and Gingerbread to stay relatively the same.