Android (News - Alert) has been ranked as one of the most popular smartphone operating system in the world.

According to the Dec. 2011 stats from market research firm comScore (News - Alert), Android took the number one spot, clocking in at 46.9 percent share of the U.S. market at the end of Nov., up from 43.8 percent at the end of Aug.2011. Apple's (News - Alert) share was up 1.4 percentage points to 28.7 percent.

Considering the growing importance of the open-source operating system, Apkudo announced the launch of Android Device Analytics, an Android device testing software, helping operators and OEMs launch Android handsets and tablets with ease.

While the open-source platform offers freedom and flexibility to developers, it also creates associated challenges especially in terms of interoperability and performance through fragmentation. There are thousands of Android apps and hundreds of Android-based devices, so operators and OEMs face the challenge of determining whether these apps run on new devices, and how they will be received in the market.

The new Android device testing software uses a mix of the popular Android system applications and an array of representative workload of the top 200 apps in the Android Market. These apps are used to test multiple attributes in actual devices - as if in a real-life scenario- and deliver the performance results and statistics about their stability.

Apkudo Device Analytics software complements the recently launched Apkudo App Analytics Platform, which allows Android application developers to test their software on a wide range of mobile devices.

 "Apkudo Device Analytics helps speed handsets and tablets to market, finding usability problems earlier in acceptance testing," said Josh Matthews, Apkudo, CEO, in a statement. "Testing with Apkudo Device Analytics helps OEMs and operators meet the fragmentation challenge and position new devices to be competitive in the dynamic mobile marketplace."

Further, to provide concrete specific recommendations, Apkudo Device Analytics performs deep analysis of the data collected by comprehensive test suites. It also interprets the results by creating rating and ranking based on different device parameters.