250 million Android devices activated to date
By Wilson • Jan 20th, 2012 • Category: Industry News
- Photo: suanie / Flickr
During their surprisingly weak earnings call – falling short of the street’s expectations – Google revealed that Android’s unreal momentum is showing no signs of slowing any time soon. The company announced that the mobile OS platform has been activated on a quarter of a billion devices, with the number of applications downloaded soaring, too. Of those device activations, 3.7 million were activated on Christmas day alone.
On iOS’ heels
For perspective on how significant the Android device activation figure is – as if 250 million is not ridiculous in and of itself – in October 2011 Apple revealed they had activated 250 million iOS devices. This, of course, included iPhones, iPads, and iPods. Android was released some two-years after Apple and has closed the gap almost exclusively with smartphone sales, since Android tablet PC sales are still relatively insignificant.
Apps market exploding
During the earnings call, Google CEO Larry Page also announced that over 11 billions apps had been downloaded from the Android market. Bank of the napkin maths reveals an average of about 44 apps per Android smartphone across the platforms lifetime.
What’s more, that application download number only accounts for what is on Google’s official app store, and precludes download stats from the Amazon Appstore, GetJar, direct app sales by publishers like EA, and other third party application marketplaces. Basically, the official apps number is certainly higher than just 11 billion. Once again, for perspective, over 18 billion iOS apps had been downloaded by October last year.
Where the influence lies
2012 is a significant year for the mobile OS team at Google. Maintaining and growing Android device activation will be a priority, as will finally kicking on in the tablet PC market, where Apple is still king and Amazon with its Kindle Fire has managed to sneak in and wedge itself into second place behind pure Android tablets.
Tags for this article: google android, iOS, mobile OS, smartphones, tablet PCs
