Google: Android activations to total 900 million this year

Google expects users to activate about 900 million Android devices this year, more than doubling the number activated in 2012, an executive said Wednesday.

Sundar Pichai, head of Google's Android and Chrome operations, said at the company's developers conference that users activated 400 million Android devices in 2012 and 100 million in 2011.

"The momentum has been breathtaking since then," Pichai said.

And Hugo Barra, vice president of product management, said Google Play has just passed 48 billion app installations, with 2.5 billion installations in the last month alone.

Google is hosting Google I/O, its annual developers conference, Wednesday in San Francisco. The online giant has been expected to announce a host of new products and provide more details about other recently announced technology such as Google Glass.

Google's Android software has become the most-used mobile operating system in the world. Canalys last week said Android ran about 60 percent of all smart devices -- phones, tablets, and notebooks -- shipped in the first quarter, while iOS came in second with 19 percent share. While Android still lags iOS in tablets, it's starting to pick up steam, much as it did before dominating smartphones.

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt in April predicted that 1 billion people will be using Android smartphones within the next six to nine months. He also said there will be nearly 2 billion Android phones within a year or two. As of April, there were more than 750 million Android phones in use across 320 carriers and 160 countries, Schmidt said, and there are 1.5 million sales or activations of Android every day.

Corrected at 9:25 a.m. PT to 900 million activations and updated with previous comments from Eric Schmidt.