Google: 200 million Android devices now active worldwide
The search giant announces that 200 million Android devices have now been activated around the world.
Google's grip on the mobile market is tightening even further.
More than 200 million Android devices have now been activated around the world, the search giant said yesterday. The figure was released yesterday at an event where the company unveiled its new Google Music service.
That level is more than double the number noted this past May at Google's I/O conference. Further, more than 550,000 devices are being activated every day, according to Engadget, up from a daily tally of 500,000 in June and 400,000 in May.
The new number also means that Google is catching up with Apple in the number of active devices. At the iPhone 4S launch event on October 4, CEO Tim Cook said that Apple had sold 250 million iOS devices up to that point, a figure that includes iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches.
The numbers comparing Android with iOS can sometimes be fuzzy, especially when talking about sales, shipments, market share, and other metrics. But most reports give the nod to Android as being the dominant OS, certainly in terms of smartphones.
New stats from Gartner peg Android's global smartphone market share at more than 52 percent, compared with iOS's 15 percent. And looking at just the U.S. a recent ComScore report gave Android a 43 percent share of the smartphone market and the iPhone a 27 percent share.
Google's numbers should soar even higher with the debut of Samsung's Galaxy Nexus, the first Android device flavored with Ice Cream Sandwich. Launching today in the U.K., the Nexus is slated to branch out to the other major markets worldwide by month's end.
Most Android devices are currently running some flavor of 2.x, according to the Android Developers site. Tracking devices that have accessed the Android market, the site found that almost 44 percent of them are on a version of Android ranging from 2.3.3 to 2.3.7. A full 40 percent are running Android 2.2 Froyo and only around 2 percent are running Android 3.x Honeycomb.