Flashback: Android Gingerbread, the OS version that refused to die, was better than you think

Before it became the zombie OS version that just wouldn’t die, Android 2.3 Gingerbread was a big deal – it brought so many things that we take for granted today, it put a new coat of paint on the UI and made the whole system more efficient.

Introduced at the end of 2010, Gingerbread would grow quickly, becoming the most popular Android version less than a year later and claiming 50% market share in December of 2011. Google stopped updating the OS distribution charts last year, but there’s evidence that v2.3 still roams the dark corridors and rattles chains to scare developers that want to…