The latest daily Android activation numbers are sure to make your head spin.
The head of Google’s mobile division Andy Rubin announced at the Mobile World Congress in Spain this week that there are 850,000 new Android devices being activated every day.
He didn’t announce how much of that came from smartphones and how much came from tablets, but clearly Android is continuing to see explosive growth, and there is no real end in sight.
Rubin made his last official “this is how many Android devices are being activated every day” announcement back in June. At that time there were 500,000 activations per day.
So the rate at which new Android-powered phones and tablets are being activated has grown 70% in just eight months.
Back in December, Rubin clarified that when he makes these announcements, “We count each device only once. Activations means you go into a store, buy a device, and put it on the network by subscribing to a wireless service.”
So this means when an Android phone is upgraded, or someone buys a used Android device, that is not tallied. Rubin made the clarification after previous milestone announcements led to confusion by some media reports as to what an “activation” actually meant.
Last month, Google CEO Eric Schmidt announced that 550,000 Android phones were being activated daily while Rubin said 700,000 Android “devices” were activated daily, which means that between 100,000 and 150,000 Android tablets were part of that equation. And that ratio has probably shot up since the Kindle Fire has come to mature.
