New figures from Google show that the latest iteration of its mobile operating system is starting to take a sizable hold throughout the existing Android market. That said, Android as a whole still remains highly fragmented throughout the various devices on which it runs.

Some four months after Android's 2.2. "Froyo" update was released into the wild, new figures from Google show that the latest iteration of its mobile operating system is starting to take a sizable hold throughout the existing Android market. That said, Android as a whole still remains highly fragmented throughout the various devices on which it runs.

As reported by Google, 28.7 percent of all Android devices are now running version 2.2 of the operating system, with the largest percentage of growth (by purchase or by updates) occurring within the month of August. Android 2.1 still remains the most-used version of the mobile operating system by a significant amount at 41.7 percent, however.

More devices are using a 1.x iteration of Android than the 2.2 update by a percentage of 39.5 percent to 28.7 percent. Of these, 17.5 percent of users are still running version 1.6 of Android, and 12 percent are stuck on version 1.5.

We phrase that as we do, for it's not as if all users have a choice to bump up to successive versions of the OS: Depending on phone and carrier support, many users of the year-old version of the Android OS might have no choice but to stick with the legacy operating system. Samsung's original Galaxy phone, for example, can only upgrade as far as Android 1.5the company's Behold II phone is forever latched to version 1.6 of the OS.

The rate of Android upgradingor ability to dois decidedly different than what's seen on the smartphones of Google's mobile OS rival, Apple. According to a late July report by Chitika Research, slightly over 50 percent of all users had upgraded to the latest iteration of the operating system, iOS 4.0, within one week of its release.

Of the remaining iPhone users, 29.86 percent were sitting on version 3.1.3 of the operating system, the most recent version prior to the launch of iOS 4. Only 2.06 percent of the approximately nine million surveyed users were running the original 3.0 iPhone update, and half thata scant 1 percentwere running any 2.x version of the OS.

Of course, all iPhonessave for first-generation modelscan freely upgrade to iOS 4. As mentioned, that's not quite the case with Android phones, given that each carrier or handset manufacturer has to customize the core Android OS for a different kind of phone.