“Google VP Andy Rubin in a Twitter update this morning says Android has crossed 500,000 new device activations per day. The milestone comes just a month and a half after the 400,000 mark,” Electronista reports.
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“The combined iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch share reached 200 million devices as of WWDC in early June where Google just crossed the 100 million mark at the Google I/O conference just under a month earlier,” Electronista reports. “The pace is likely to keep Google’s combined platform growing, although not necessarily in the US. Some recent studies have shown Android leveling off in the country either as it reaches saturation or as the Verizon iPhone has been taking away customers that would previously have had no choice but to buy Android.”
Thanks to iPad, “the bias is also heavily in favor of Apple for tablets…”
Read more in the full article here.
When a VP in a large company starts to promote his own division in public it means his day and his division in the said company is numbered.
When does the shareholder receive an explanation of the financial impact of Android. What does it cost and what does it bring???
I hope Apple does do something great in search and advertising, because Google will implode a lot quicker than Rim is. Rim was entrenched, Google is a one trick pony, that can be replaced with a maximum of 3 clicks on a mouse.
I think search will come from Apple, eventually. Apple doesn’t introduce products just for the sake for publicity. Apple knows how to say “no” to 1,000 things and it will take its time to make sure that a product is effectively workable before it surprises the world. Most of the killer products have been around before Apple comes in to sweep the world off their feet.
On the other hand, Google always rushes out half-baked products just for the sake of earning some brownie points. Thus, its obsession with perpetual betas.
Really? Rubin’s days are numbered?
He’s the father of Android! If not for him there’d be no Android platform or Gingerbread.
Rubin’s not going anywhere till he’s says so. Unless of course, he’s taking a page from his Apple playbook, again.
Scientist tweets that 500,000 cockroaches are born each day.
MILLIONS of cockroaches are born every minute…
Doesn’t mean that I want to carry one around in my pocket.
500_000 cockroaches? That accounts for a few blocks in any major city.
Think larger. Much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much larger.
Remember, the cockroaches were here before the dinosaurs. They will be here long, long, long, long after humans are gone.
You all are taking my post too literally. The quantity and time span matched to story, and the point is I do not consider either event worth celebrating.
Nope. Not taking it literally.
Doesn’t matter if they’re born in a minute, doesn’t matter if they’re born in a week…
I simply would not want an Android Cockroach…
in.. my… pocket.
And how much does Google make per “activation”?
I still find it curious that they have say “activations” instead of “sales.”
No one is impressed by $0.00 in sales. It makes it look like Android is not doing anything. (Which is the case, but Google won’t admit it.)
Yes, in spite of all the blather about Android being the “iPhone-killer,” and how Android is “winning,” everyone forgets that the iPhone alone now generates more revenue per quarter than Google’s entire operation generates per quarter.
That amazing factoid gets lost among the bloviating.
The Oracle lawyers are rubbing their hands with anticipation.
Good observation. I sure hope they’re listening!
Is this number independently verifiable? Otherwise I call bullshit. Either Rubin is pulling them out of his ass or there is a flood of craptastic Droids about to hit the landfill soon.
I just passed through four large airports on two continents. Overwhelmingly it was iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks. The charging stations were crowded tentacles of white cords all leading to Apple devices. Every departure lounge, every row on the planes: iPhones, iPads, and more iPhones. Hundreds of them. I saw only a few cheap throw away phones, one blackberry, one Kindle, and absolutely NO android phones. Where are they all?
Where are they? They are in the basements of mothers of geeks everywhere.
Android owners can’t afford to fly. You can find them on greyhound buses.
In the luggage compartment. Hey, it’s free!
You were surrounded by people that can afford an airplane ticket. What’d you expect?
Because at these places a person does not want to reveal that he is a fool and a cheapskate by owning an Android. There are millions of Androids hiding inside pockets and luggages but it’s only iPhones and iPads that are making a statement of their existence and desirability.
Obviously he’s pulling this number out of the chinese division of his ass. He’s probably including OMS and Tapas, the two Chinese Android derivatives. Those two alone probably account for half of the activations. Check out this article http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/02/01/oms-tapas. That growth is obviously not coming from the US, Europe or Australia where Android has stalled. All of this doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. Google’s not making money from Android. I doubt the incremental mobile ad revenue even covers the development cost.
Lots of super cheap stupidphones with Android go for sale in China and India for like $80 — so no wonder.
One word for Andy: breakdown.
China’s a big country. The disingenuous practice of counting your rival’s knock-off phones in your OS total tells you all you need to know about Rubin’s integrity.
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/02/01/google_android_counts_include_rival_chinese_variants.html
I’m with you, I call shenanigans.
500k is a nice number and growing. However, numbers only give a count of devices with little information on the experience of the user.
Google says little on product build, quality, or how many are running the lastest security / software updates.
To be honest, Google probably cares very little as long as search and personal data keeps rolling in on the owners.
Is that 500,000 devices a day once a month?
Important that they mention “although not necessarily in the US” as they must have been giving away boatloads of androids in developing nations as a tax strategy. No one really wants to PAY for them. And frankly, donating smartphones to the developing world might be both a noble decision, and a good way to avoid landfills.
“…a good way to avoid landfills’
..in the USA, of course.
ah yes 500K android activations but the profits equal to 50K iphones..lol.
let them activate a million, only the quicker to fragment and metal reclaim the hordes of throwaway google phones, that can not be updated. And already obsolete OS when launched!
500,000/day x 365days = bullsh!T…somebody jerking the numbers off…
Nice try though…
I agree. that makes 15 million android devices per month, or 180 million a year. That is not true. Maybe that is googles dream to activate that many devices, but not real numbers.
I bet a lot of these are people who are getting a new phone but aren’t actually using all the features of a smartphone, so once activated they’re just being used as regular phones. Which is not what google wants at all.
where is Greenpeace on this schtick? What types of hazardous materials are used to create these Android land fillers? I’m sure the Eric T. Mole Schmidt could give a rats ass about the environment. Don’t be evil? yeah right.
like greenpeace, google has no integrity, so they were probably just paid off
landfills? give them to all me…there’s gold in ’em da phones… along with other precious metals…
That would be my guess as well, no one wants to pay for the android phones, so “donate” them to India or China for tax purposes.
Now, let’s see the number of activations that Google gets to put ads in and actually get revenue from. I know about 150,000 plus activations a day from Asia won’t count.
500k/day = about 45 million per quarter. Is that possible? How many have they activated in recent quarters?
Apple sold, what, about 18 million iPhones last quarter, and that’s a massive number. How can there be so many more Android activations than iPhone sales? I really don’t get it.
Even with Apple’s growth it have no more than 360 000 iOS activation per day — 500 000 for Android is the power of super cheap phones in China and India.
234 Trillion flies eat shit every day.
There are heaps of android craps around the globe that no analyst ever count. There are 3 types:
1. counterfeit product (usually branded as iPhone, Nokia, SE etc), This is illegal, underground market. Priced about USD 50.
2. cheap chinese crap phone (MiTo, ti-phone, etc), Priced about USD 70-150.
3. big brands (HTC, SE, Samsung, this is the figures that analysts have).
Point 1 and 2 are huge market in Asia.
the problem is you guys are thinking USA. I think this is perfectly possible (500,000 activations per day) , because people in 3rd world countries are replacing their nokia dumb phones with “smartphones”, for the same price “free”. You can’t put the iphone on the same boat as android, when android sells devices for nothing. That is not bad news for apple though even though fandroids will probably paint it that way.
500k activations
400k of them are replacements.
When you give away your product… It isn’t that hard to move them. Until people realize how crappy the product is…
It’s funny, at work there is the android bunch.
They claim superiority over all other phones all the time. And also complain the most about their phones…
One guy that bought a iPhone from Verizon, who at first loved it and now says he will go android next time cause his son told him he should.
I asked him why…
1: Verizon dinged him with an overage charge due to pandora streaming all day every day…
2: he dropped his iPhone and it has a scratch in the screen that bugs him…
3: he claims he has to charge his iPhone every night…
I tried explaining to him that the scratch, is his fault for no screen protection. The overage charge.. Is Verizon not apple.
And the battery drain.. Could be the fact that he always streams pandora etc all day.
I pointed out to him that the biggest android user at work Paul… Has his android plugged in all day. (he tried saying that Paul doesn’t charge his android every night, which he doesn’t. He just plugs it in all day at work..)
The guy comained that apple forbids him from changing the wallpaper… And his son can on his android….. Some people…
“I’m not saying that all senior citizens that can’t master technology should be publicly flogged. But, if we made an example of one or two it might give the others incentive to try harder.”
Your parting shot against ‘senior citizens’ seems misplaced. The guy’s halfhearted answers to your questions about why he’s planning to switch from an iPhone to Android phone were preceded by this: “he will go android next time cause his son told him he should.”
So perhaps it is sons who give advice to their parents who need to be flogged. Plus you, of course.
The QUOTE is from big bang theory.
It’s comedy, which obviously you don’t get.
Ha ha ha so funny
I think anyone who spends money on ANY tech and then complains that they cant make it work ’cause they didn’t read the instructions should be flogged publicly.
Like people who drive their cars with the “Check Engine” light on for a month… then are baffled when one day the thing just stops running. Yes… publicly flogged.
FTB’s about one of the most accommodating posters in the forum. I’m sure he meant no harm by that. I didn’t read anything offensive in his comment.
Perhaps it’s the “buy one get 500,000 free” offers that are upping the numbers?
Cheapest iPhone 4 out there is now $650 (without subsidy, unlocked, in the US, legitimately). Cheapest Android devices in the US are $99 (Huawei Ascend, on MetroPCS; no-contract CDMA device).
For the price of 1 new iPhone, you get 6 new Android phones, plus enough cash left for 1 month of service. Nowhere near the same league, these two.
Nokia makes over 400 million per year alone.
i wonder how many deactivations per day there are. if you get another cheap phone to replace your existing cheap phone then this is just turnover. this increases “market share” artificially but actual usage stays constant.
I could see it if they are counting worldwide numbers.
Anyone laughing that they are making no money from Android is missing the point of Android right from the start.
Android was not created solely to make money (although they certainly hope to profit from it).
Its considering to be an offensive move to create a large computing platform that Google cannot be locked out of.
Google counts ‘activations’ because currently that is all they care about, get the platform out there and build it up.
Google invests in various things for odd reasons (or so it looks to many of us outside). I don’t get some of it, I get android from their perspective, its about having control of their own destiny and entrenching themselves as a ‘needed’ component of the new era of devices and computing.
Going to be fun to watch how everything plays out in the next few years. Awesome times to be enjoying technology for us!!