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Andy Rubin: 700,000 Android activations a day

Crazy stuff.

I wonder what the combined figure is for Android, Apple, and the other players. That's a lot of people activating every day.
 
hot damn. Thats insane.

I am also interested to see how many people are activating a smartphone in general every day.
 
Phynaz said:
About 500,000 of would be cheap junk phones in China.
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Now that Android already has 40%+ of the market in the US, the two biggest mobile markets in the world (China and India) are the next logical step.

700,000/day, assuming that number doesn't keep climbing like it has been, works out to 255 million units/year.
 
I'm wondering how that accounts for people that switch phones often. I've had my google account signed in on various Android phones that I've used since the first Android phone I got which was in the summer of 2010. Do each of those count as an activation? In my case I have using prepaid and so have upgraded my phone as much as I could using ebay and craigslist to get phones off contract.
 
Ksyder said:
I'm wondering how that accounts for people that switch phones often. I've had my google account signed in on various Android phones that I've used since the first Android phone I got which was in the summer of 2010. Do each of those count as an activation? In my case I have using prepaid and so have upgraded my phone as much as I could using ebay and craigslist to get phones off contract.
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Well if you got the phone off ebay or craigslist it was used so that doesn't count as an activation. If bought brand new then it counts as an activation according to his posting...
 
Few things come to my mind when I read this:

1) Several hundreds of thousands of Android phones are discarded/traded/ebay'ed every day to make way for the new devices. Otherwise a year from now, assuming that rate doesn't dwindle down, about 4-5% of the entire world's population use Android smartphones. If we count only 30% of that activation number as being true for US (210,000 Android phones a day), that means about 25% of entire US population, regardless of age or income or social status, uses Android smartphones in a year. Not even counting the current base. Does that sound reasonable?

2) What happens if I go through a phone, find it defective and return it, then find the replacement phone defective and return that one as well? 3 strikes for me. 2 devices probably go straight back to factory. Not to imply anything, but that can drive "activation" number way up.

3) What happens if I change my phone's identification by installing a custom ROM? Does that count as well?

4) If I obscure my IMEI number while trying to unlock the phone, the result is that the phone is still usable on its original carrier, but can no longer be unlocked without first fixing the IMEI. But it's still perfectly capable of accessing the Market and all of Google services. Does that one count as well?

Number 2 can happen with any other platform (especially for iOS), so that's a more reasonable explanation to me. Number 3 and 4 can definitely happen, and especially more so as people flash ROMs daily. I don't know about others, but I can flash my Captivate to a Vibrant ROM and then to a Galaxy S ROM and at each step with 2 different IMEI numbers if I were to try to unlock the phone and fail in the process, so that alone accounts for 6 phones without any exchange.

Not to dispute the number, but to say that's the actual count of real phones, I just don't buy it.
 
runawayprisoner said:
Few things come to my mind when I read this:

1) Several hundreds of thousands of Android phones are discarded/traded/ebay'ed every day to make way for the new devices. Otherwise a year from now, assuming that rate doesn't dwindle down, about 4-5% of the entire world's population use Android smartphones. If we count only 30% of that activation number as being true for US (210,000 Android phones a day), that means about 25% of entire US population, regardless of age or income or social status, uses Android smartphones in a year. Not even counting the current base. Does that sound reasonable?

2) What happens if I go through a phone, find it defective and return it, then find the replacement phone defective and return that one as well? 3 strikes for me. 2 devices probably go straight back to factory. Not to imply anything, but that can drive "activation" number way up.

3) What happens if I change my phone's identification by installing a custom ROM? Does that count as well?

4) If I obscure my IMEI number while trying to unlock the phone, the result is that the phone is still usable on its original carrier, but can no longer be unlocked without first fixing the IMEI. But it's still perfectly capable of accessing the Market and all of Google services. Does that one count as well?

Number 2 can happen with any other platform (especially for iOS), so that's a more reasonable explanation to me. Number 3 and 4 can definitely happen, and especially more so as people flash ROMs daily. I don't know about others, but I can flash my Captivate to a Vibrant ROM and then to a Galaxy S ROM and at each step with 2 different IMEI numbers if I were to try to unlock the phone and fail in the process, so that alone accounts for 6 phones without any exchange.

Not to dispute the number, but to say that's the actual count of real phones, I just don't buy it.
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No different than any other phone's numbers I assume.
 
zerocool84 said:
No different than any other phone's numbers I assume.
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Nope. No different at all. Companies like to hype their numbers up, no doubt.

What I'm trying to say is that Android's numbers seem way too inflated. Perhaps more so than the others.

It might be that those numbers would go down in the coming months, and then it'll be at a more reasonable rate. Right now, it's saying that it takes just another year for Android to capture 1/4 of US population, which doesn't sound right to me. Unless US is not as large a market for smartphone as I thought.
 
runawayprisoner said:
Nope. No different at all. Companies like to hype their numbers up, no doubt.

What I'm trying to say is that Android's numbers seem way too inflated. Perhaps more so than the others.

It might be that those numbers would go down in the coming months, and then it'll be at a more reasonable rate. Right now, it's saying that it takes just another year for Android to capture 1/4 of US population, which doesn't sound right to me. Unless US is not as large a market for smartphone as I thought.
Click to expand...

The us smartphone market is growing very quickly as well.
 
vshah said:
based on your assumption of 30% of that number coming from the US. it may be much less.
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I'd assume that it has to be over 10% at least, because US is obviously one of the biggest markets for Android. Unless they are saying that both the US and Europe don't account for more than 50% of the pie, so then... the next question is where the rest of those devices go.

Also I think I may have overlooked this, but if they are also counting Chinese phones and tablets that run Android, then it may make sense... and then the assumption that both US and Europe aren't 50% of the pie might be true given how large the Chinese counterfeit market is.
 
runawayprisoner said:
I'd assume that it has to be over 10% at least, because US is obviously one of the biggest markets for Android. Unless they are saying that both the US and Europe don't account for more than 50% of the pie, so then... the next question is where the rest of those devices go.

Also I think I may have overlooked this, but if they are also counting Chinese phones and tablets that run Android, then it may make sense... and then the assumption that both US and Europe aren't 50% of the pie might be true given how large the Chinese counterfeit market is.
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Google has said previously that only devices with access to the Google Market and other official Google Apps are counted.
 
Google has been pretty honest with their tablet numbers so I see no reason to mistrust these numbers. Also, the rate of growth is slowing. I don't know if it's temporary or if we're going to see them top out soon, but when they announced 500k a few people were predicting one million activations per day by this time based on the rate of growth. Not that it really matters much as 700k/day is still pretty damned amazing.
 
sciwizam said:
Then what difference does it make to Google if it's a legit Android device or a "counterfeit" Android device?
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I'd think that it counts as a new activation, and I think that's all that counts to them.

Note that the difference is that if Google were to count what new device tries to access, say, the market as a new activation, then I can mask my Android phone and access the market every 15 minutes with a different ID. I wonder if that would count as a new device as well...

Mopetar said:
Google has been pretty honest with their tablet numbers so I see no reason to mistrust these numbers. Also, the rate of growth is slowing. I don't know if it's temporary or if we're going to see them top out soon, but when they announced 500k a few people were predicting one million activations per day by this time based on the rate of growth. Not that it really matters much as 700k/day is still pretty damned amazing.
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I think the tablet numbers are more believable because... Honeycomb's source was "closed" for a period of time, and so... it could only exist on a handful of models that Google "approved". In a sense, it was "honest" because there was no reason why it could have been affected. But when it comes to Android count in general, all Android versions prior to Honeycomb have been open-source, and pretty much anyone can put them on something. That's the problem.
 
runawayprisoner said:
I'd think that it counts as a new activation, and I think that's all that counts to them.

Note that the difference is that if Google were to count what new device tries to access, say, the market as a new activation, then I can mask my Android phone and access the market every 15 minutes with a different ID. I wonder if that would count as a new device as well...
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Why would anyone do that? What are they gaining?
 
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Does that count all the 3G e-ink readers out there? I'm pretty sure they're all running Android of some type.
 
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