‘Gingerbread,’ or Android versions 2.3 through 2.3.7, dominates with 50.8 percent of the Android pie.

‘Ice Cream Sandwich,’ or versions 4.0.3 through 4.0.4, is second with 27.5 percent, with the latest ‘Jelly Bean’ build at 6.7 percent.

As demonstrated by that graph on the Android Developers Website, there are a lot of devices running a lot of different versions of Android out there in the ecosystem, all with different capabilities.

Android 4.2 marks the launch of a powerful new security system built right into the platform. The key component is a real-time app scanning service that instantly checks apps put on your device for any malicious or potentially harmful code.

The feature is an extension of the security technology Google introduced for the Play Store this past February. While that technology worked exclusively on the server side, analyzing apps that were uploaded to the Play Store, the new system works with your device and scans any apps you install from third-party sources (a process known as “sideloading”).

“We view security as a universal thing,” Android VP of Engineering Hiroshi Lockheimer tells me. “Assuming the user wants this additional insurance policy, we felt like we shouldn’t exclude one source over another.”

Following typical Google fashion, the new scanning service is completely opt-in: The first time you install an app from a source other than the Play Store — including a third-party app market like Amazon’s app store — Android pops up a box asking if you want such applications to be checked for “harmful behavior.”

When we first contemplated Android and formed the Open Handset Alliance, we wanted to create an open virtuous cycle where all members of the ecosystem would benefit. We thought hard about what types of external factors could intervene to weaken the ecosystem as a whole. One important external factor we knew could do this was incompatibilities between implementations of Android.

While Android remains free for anyone to use as they would like, only Android compatible devices benefit from the full Android ecosystem. By joining the Open Handset Alliance, each member contributes to and builds one Android platform — not a bunch of incompatible versions.

Thanks to their support the Android ecosystem now has over 500 million Android-compatible devices and counting!

Intel is also faced with the task of booting ARM SoCs from market segments that they dominate—iOS and Android and all of the apps that run on those platforms are all developed for ARM first, and while Intel’s binary translator does a pretty good job of running Android applications on Intel’s processors (see AnandTech’s analysis here), there are still cases where things aren’t working quite yet.