Wireless providers are now activating more than half a million Android devices every day, according to a tweet from Google's Andy Rubin.
"There are now over 500,000 Android devices activated every day," wrote Rubin, vice president of engineering at Google.
That number is increasing every day, he said, growing 4.4 percent week over week.
The announcement comes almost seven months after Rubin announced that carriers were activating 300,000 Android phones per day. Two months before that, Eric Schmidt said that number was at 200,000 activations per day.
Since December, Google has formally unveiled Android Honeycomb, a version of the mobile OS built for tablets, first unveiled via the Motorola Xoom. In late April, Google announced an Android OS update to version 2.3.4, which mostly contained a number of bug fixes, but also included support for video and voice chat with Google Talk. Several weeks later, it opened its Google I/O conference by announcing a new version of Honeycomb, its next-generation "Ice Cream Sandwich" release, as well as movies, music, and Android accessories.
Google is also not facing any major competition from Apple this summer. Cupertino, which normally unveils a new iPhone in June, has kept users waiting for its next-generation smartphone. Apple's latest press event focused on Mac OS X Lion and iOS 5, which will debut in the fall—most likely with the iPhone 5.
A recent report from IDC said that Android will capture about 40 percent of the market in the second half of 2011. IDC pointed to the "significant and growing list of vendors who have made Android the cornerstone of their respective smartphones strategies," as the key to its success. Android will likely have 38.9 percent market share in 2011, growing to 43.8 percent by 2015.
Raising some eyebrows, IDC also predicted that Windows Phone—not iOS—will be the second-most popular mobile platform in 2015.
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