It’s hard to believe that less than a year ago we were still retraining ourselves to type play.google.com into our browsers instead of market.roid.com. But it was exactly 12 months ago this dnesday that consolidated the Android et, Music, the search giant’s e-bookstore into one amalgamated entity., to celebrate the first birthday of the ay Store, is doing what it does best: giving away free stuff.

Starting dnesday, will be giving away free content reduced-priced items on ay. At the time of this writing some of the ay highlights included a free download of the song Sweet ne by Velvet Underground 50 percent off Kung-Fu 2. Morgan Rice’s novel A Quest of Heroes was also free, as was the pilot episode of AMC’s Breaking Bad. You can also get free gaming exclusives such as new characters, in-game purchases, other content from Disney, Flaregames, ayGearz. Overall, the sale is not as exciting as the 25-cent sale offered last fall, but it’s a rare Android user who can resist the siren call of the number zero. says more content will be added to the ay first birthday sale page throughout the week.

The first year of the ay store isn’t all the search giant has to celebrate this week. There are finally more users running versions of Android 4.x (Ice Cream Swich up) than Android 2.3, a.k.a. Gingerbread. Around 45.1 percent of Android users are now using Android 4.x, followed closely by 44.2 percent on various iterations of Gingerbread, according to stats on the Android Developers site.

Ice Cream Swich was introduced in fall 2011 was a major stepping stone for Android since it was the first version of ’s mobile OS designed for use with both tablets smartphones. It also offered more advanced touch gestures, improved core apps such as Gmail Calendar, a new “running apps” view first seen in Android 3.0, Honeycomb. Ice Cream Swich was also viewed by many critics as Android’s “coming of age” where the OS was truly competitive with Apple’s iOS.

Despite critical accolades overall improvements, however, Android 4.0 struggled with adoption as phones continued to roll out loaded with Android 2.3, first introduced in late 2010. Gingerbread’s staying powerhas finally begun to recede, but the downside is the majority of Android 4.x users are running Ice Cream Swich. So even though more people are running a modern version of Android, they are missing some of the great advances in Android 4.1, lly Bean such as improved touch responsiveness Now, the search giant’s take on a virtual personal assistant.

Nevertheless, Gingerbread was quickly becoming as unshakeable to as ndows Xwas to Microsoft so a decline in Android 2.3 usage is a good thing for Android. So this week can celebrate two steps towards modernity for Android: a one-year old ay store the growing user base on Android 4.x devices.