More evidence that the world is crazy for mobile devices: Google reports that 700,000 devices featuring its Android operating systems are being activated every day.
That's up from just 500,000 in June, a pretty remarkable growth rate of 28 percent in less than six months. Google Vice President and mighty overseer of Android made the announcement on the company's social-networking service Tuesday, and was quick to clarify that there's no fuzzy math going on here, saying, "For those wondering, we count each device only once (ie, we don't count re-sold devices), and "activations" means you go into a store, buy a device, put it on the network by subscribing to a wireless service."
Is Google pleased with these numbers? Obviously. But they could've been even better. Activations rose to 550,000 in July after topping the half-million mark in June, so presumably, keeping that pace, could've hit 800,000 this month. Surely the debut of the iPhone 4S in October ate into Android's growth a bit. By comparison, the most recent figures, from October, put iPhone activations at 275,000 per day – quite a ways behind, but certainly not bad considering it's one phone versus dozens of Android offerings from multiple manufacturers.
It's been quite a year for Android, which most analysts figure now has a market share anywhere between 40 and 55 percent.
