Ice Cream Sandwich now on 16 percent of Android phones

Ice Cream Sandwich's share of the Android market continues to grow rapidly, with the operating system now present on nearly 16 percent of all Android phones.

Ice Cream Sandwich has more than doubled its distribution share over the space of a single month -- variants of Android 4.0 have risen from a combined total of 7.1 percent to 15.9 percent, according to figures from Google.

Gingerbread, version 2.3 -- first released in December 2010 -- remains the most popular Android version to date with more than 60 percent of the Android market.

The statistics show that Ice Cream Sandwich's successor, Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, is yet to make much headway. Announced at Google I/O in June, the Jelly Bean version of the mobile OS is now skirting the 1 percent mark.

Any boost to Jelly Bean's rankings will come from hardware partners dishing out upgrades to existing users: while Samsung and are rolling it out to some devices, Motorola, LG, and Sony have yet to announce Jelly Bean updates.

The data was collected from Android devices that access Google Play, the Android app store formerly known as the Android Market, during the two week period ending August 1.