This is how long Google will need to sell as many phones as Samsung

Google’s place in the smartphone market is kind of a weird one. It has never really felt like the company has ever intended for its Nexus or Pixel smartphones to ever reach the heights that other companies like Samsung or Apple have reached.

In fact, according to the latest data from IDC, Google has managed to sell 27.6 million Pixel phones ever since the lineup was originally introduced back in 2016. While 27.6 million phones sounds like a lot, as noted by Bloomberg’s Vlad Savov, that’s only 1/10 of the number of phones Samsung has sold in 2021 alone.

Since Google launched Pixel phones in 2016, it's sold 27.6 million units. That's 1/10 of Samsung's 2021 sales. In other words, Google would need 60 years to sell as many phones as Samsung sells in one.

Data: IDC

— Vlad Savov (@vladsavov) October 4, 2022

Yup, you read that right, the number of Pixel phones Google has sold in total cannot even match up to a third of the number of phones Samsung sold in a single year. Extrapolating those numbers, Savov points out that at this rate, Google would need 60 years in order to catch up to Samsung’s 2021 figures alone, which by then the South Korean tech giant would have probably gone on to sell hundreds of millions, if not billions, of phones by then.

That being said, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing or a metric that Google may even care about in the first place. After all, Android is the most widely-used smartphone platform in the world, and with a lot of Android users relying on Google’s products and services, which helps them rake in ad revenue, we imagine that hardware sales are probably not a very high priority to the company.