By Google’s Eric Schmidt is back with more music to our Android-loving ears as he’s confirmed that Android’s now seeing an activation rate of 200,000 per day. The last figure we’d gotten was back in May when Google and some 5,000-odd developers convened on the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco for their developer conference, IO. Back then, 160,000 was the ballpark figure.
Since nearly 2 months ago, that’s a 25% increase in activations. It wasn’t long ago that we’d entered 2010 and the Nexus One, HTC Desire, and Motorola Droid were the three phones that pretty much defined the Android experience. There were two problems, though: the Motorola Droid was only on one carrier (albeit a fairly large one) and the Nexus One wasn’t being marketed to sell. Desire did well for itself, but it had no penetration in the US market (yes, I know: everything’s not about us yanks.)
Since then, though, smartphone manufacturers have gone completely bonkers with introducing new smartphones each and every day ranging from entry level cheap phones to high-end mammoths. Different form factors, screen sizes, add-on features (QWERTY, front-facing camera, HDMI) drove user choice as we’ve seen dozens – if not nearing hundreds – of phones released for the world’s wireless “talkbox” providers to date.
Let’s throw out a large number and run with it, just for entertainment purposes. If – for the next 365 days – 200,000 Android handsets continued to be activated each day, that’s 73,000,000 Android phones per year. While I’m sure that daily activation rate fluctuates (and since no one really knows what Google considers an activation, we can’t determine if the number equates to devices sold), it sounds pretty damning for other phones running other operating systems (no, I’m not going to mention them in this gloat-post).
All I can say at this point is I can’t wait for Q3 to be up. With even more superphones launching, a tablet market getting ready to take off, and a hand basket full of other unique Android phones coming to town by every major manufacturer, I’ll be front and center to see how Android’s doing against the competition in three months’ time.
[Wishful Thinking image courtesy of Rustic Ranch Tack. Chart courtesy of Unwired View]
Keep in mind, this is just the number of activations. Not the number of phones sold, or even the number of new Android users. Depending on what they define as an activation, I’m willing to bet that some of those are phones doing factory resets (after which they have to be reactivated), which wouldn’t count as either phones sold or new Android users. And there are probably many that are upgrading from older Android phones as well, which count for phones sold, but again, no increased market share. HOWEVER, the number is still impressive, and I think we can safely assume that the majority of these activations are from people new to Android. It’s hard to say for sure whether the majority of these people are converting from other smartphone platforms or from dumbphones, but I’m guessing it’s probably more from dumbphones right now. That means it is now the most popular consumer smartphone platform of choice, and it’s currently holding the lead in smartphone market share in the USA.
I am surprised google just destroyed apple in a few months.
iphone numbers will start falling off just as blackberry numbers have fallen off.
RIP iphone 4
Granted, there’s not enough data points to draw firm conclusions, but over the last 40 weeks, this growth rate looks approximately exponential, doubling every 10 weeks or so. Impressive!
Great news !!!! I am from Hong Kong, I own 2 N1 phones.
@mike – seriously?
I would be skeptical of the numbers if the other reports didn’t seem to confirm them. Look at the reports of 800%+ growth from last year, 300%+ growth in the UK over the past spring, two different analyst groups confirming that Android not only outsold iOS but BlackBerry. The numbers seem to all be adding up and it make sense if you think about how these high end phones are coming out. Theres a new wave of folk with each one of them. It started with the Droid and every month or two another one comes along…Incredible, Evo, Droid X, Galaxy S, Droid 2… And now we’ve got rumors of a dual core coming and the Galaxy S2 or whatever it was called. Its just nonstop and obviously someone has to be buying these phones to keep the manufacturers so interested in dropping new ones every couple of months. So its a bit hard to NOT accept the numbers in my opinion.
Where’s the news item about what Schmidt had to say about net neutrality? Apparently Schmidt doesn’t believe that all Internet sites (nor free speech) should be equal served.
Well there must be lots of new users still though since my apps sold really really well in January and I never though they would ever do better than Jan (they dropped off some after that), but last month I blew January out of the water in sales, almost doubled.
-Brad 2
no matter how you twist the stat and interpret it….. you have to admit one thing.
what iPhone couldn’t do in three years (with all the hype and marketing), android did it in less than 2 years (less than a year if you consider Droid to be the real launch of android). What is that? Android just toppled RIM from the top spot. Now, that just awes me.
Can’t imagine what will happen when phones with gingerbread onboard will be released with revamped ui.
OEM’s are looking at these stats and getting even more excited at the android opportunity.
The android market rules. I heard that Chinese firms are now making and selling android phones solely for the Chinese market. Best of all they are ripping out the Google search engine and replacing it with Baidu. ANDROID ROCK ON FOREVER DUDES!!
Lawrence. Why do you need two N1’s? This appears to question the activation numbers when people are buying more than one phone.
When you let people do *whatever* they want with the code, it becomes a standard just like tcp/ip
Nevermind, works now!