It's difficult to imagine the sheer scale of Android's growth even when the numbers are presented - there are now more than 850,000 new activations each day, up from 700,000 announced on December 20 last year. Yet that doesn't include those thousands of Android powered devices that don't use Google Services and make no mistake, that's a lot of uncounted phones and tablets. Like the Kindle Fire, for example, the best selling Android tablet with nearly 10% of the tablet market. Or basically any Android device sold in China, a bigger mobile market than the US now. Which could mean in reality that the daily total is a massive 15% larger than reported, or North of 970,000.
But surely that's lower growth than previously? Well, in market share percentage terms, the closer Android gets to 100% of the market, the less available share there is to capture, so the 250% growth year on year is certainly not as spectacular looking as the 2010/11 number which was in the ~400% range. But looking at the figures Mr Rubin has just shared with us, the reality is more surprising than you'd think at first glance.
In July, Rubin announced 550,000 daily activations while in December that had increased to 700,000, an increase each month to the daily activations of an additional 30,000. But between December and February, that monthly increase in activations has expanded to 75,000, two and a half times that of the monthly increase from July to December. Impressive doesn't seem adequate to describe it. And remember, that doesn't include any devices without Google Services.
As many Android devices as people in South America?
Rubin has also confirmed that there are more than 300 million Android devices in the wild, around 16 million shy of total iOS iDevices which had a year and a half head start and whose ranks are inflated by iPods. It would seem that at the rate that Google's mobile OS continues to grow, there will be more Android kit in user's hands than the Apple competition in fewer than two months from now. The most recent activation estimates for all of Apple's iOS iGadgets, excluding the iPod, indicate they are approximately half of Android's official activation numbers. On the other hand, WinPhone's share at present is so small that it looks like a margin of error rather than a competitive attempt. But it's early days and some of us well remember the pre-Droid days when Android's chances looked similarly underwhelming, so we can't count MS and Nokia out yet.
Rubin's blog also contained the interesting tidbit that the number of Android apps has trebled in just one year. Which points to the platform as being a fertile ground for developers and should see the Market become first priority over of the Apple App Store in the near future. In case the actual numbers matter to you, at the last MWC there were 150,000 apps in the Market and as of today, that number now exceeds 450,000, more than I personally would bother browsing.
Source: Google Mobile Blog
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