The days of Apple and Google’s tit-for-tat device activation race has long since passed with Google emerging the clear victor. The search giant’s Android operating system pulled ahead, somewhat inevitably, due to the broad range of devices available and, some would argue, its increasing quality compared the ageing iOS interface.
At I/O 2011, Google’s annual developer conference in San Francisco back in May, Google proudly announced they were activating 400,000 Android devices per day. According to a tweet by Andy Rubin, Google’s SVP of Mobile and Android mastermind, as of this morning the company are now activating a staggering half a million devices (both handsets and tablets) every single day. Not only that, but the activation rate is growing by 4.4% week-on-week.
This means, via some back-of-a-napkin calculations, that if Android can sustain its 4.4% growth rate, Rubin and his team should be activating one million devices per day by mid-October, and activating two million devices per day by the end of January 2012. Of course if Android growth continues to accelerate – which it shows every sign of doing – these milestones could come even sooner.
Apple only divulge details of their device shipments during their quarterly earnings call – the next of which is due any day now – however from the results released last quarter we can see that Jobs and Co. shipped 18.6 million iPhones and 4.7 million iPads, meaning around 260,000 iOS devices were bought every day, putting them in a distant second. Apple’s iPod Touch numbers are rolled up into the total 9 million iPods sold, however even with the addition of these iOS activations would still fall far short of Android’s figures.
What Rubin didn’t reveal in his tweet was what percentage of those activations are Android tablets as opposed to handsets. Although Apple may be falling behind overall, a recent study showed that they are still absolutely dominant in the tablet space, with the companies iPad accounting for 97% of all tablet usage in the US
