Outdated Android devices exposing security threats?

According to the recent figures released by Google's Android Developer blog this week; most Android smartphone and tablet owners are still using older versions of the OS will bring a slew of security concerns along with it.

The statistics revealed that over 60 percent of present Android users are running what are considered obsolescent versions of the OS, that is, versions released prior to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS).

This implies that a significant number of Android users are open to security vulnerabilities because they are running much older versions of the mobile OS that haven't been updated with Google's latest security patches.

Collected from all devices that have accessed Google Play during a 14-day period ending 3 January, the data represented that 0.2 percent of users are on Android 1.6 Donut, 2.4 percent on 2.1 Éclair, 9.0 percent on 2.2 Froyo, 47.6 percent on 2.3 Gingerbread and 1.5 percent on 3.x Honeycomb.

According to media reports,even android users are complaining about their distress at being open to security threats.

Google also announced in its Android Developer blog post that more than 10 percent of all Android users are now using the 4.x Jelly Bean version. But this figure would be much higher if phone makers like Samsung, Sony, Asus, LG, Motorola and HTC supported older devices for longer, instead of offering users one update to the latest version, then denying them further updates in a year or so after they launch new smartphone devices.