
Andy Rubin: Google activates 300,000 phones every day - andre3k1
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/12/08/andy-rubin-google-activates-300000-phones-every-day/
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metachris
Wow, that's almost 110 million devices per year!

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prs
Not if you factor in that sales of electronics typically pick up in the fourth
quarter due to the holidays.

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jackvalentine
That is a lot of phones. What does it actually mean though? Android is fast
becomming the lowest common denominator for a phone OS?

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megablast
Yes, for some reason they do not mention the number of Android phones sold a
day, though this is still an interesting number. Apple, Google and Microsoft
are all playing the numbers game, Apple only talks about iOs devices sold (not
iPhone, iPad, etc...), Google talk about activations, and Microsoft are happy
to talk about kinnect numbers, but not their phones.

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Seth_Kriticos
The difference is, that iOS devices have a much stronger bounding to Apple and
can be put in direct revenue numbers.

For Google, the royalties and sales shares of the platform is not as important
as having it out there, seamlessly integrating into their online offering. As
such, they don't even have these numbers, they just see how many people
connect.

For them it basically means: "we have 300k more people every day who are
surfing our cloud".

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tomjen3
Does this imply that they are all new phones? By activating, I guess they mean
adding gmail to those phones (Android source can be downloaded for free, so
that can't be it), but I have two gmail accounts on this one alone.

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ben1040
According to this, Android's numbers also include other devices with cellular
modems built in, like B&N's Nook.

[http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/07/16/steve-jobs-
confirms-a...](http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/07/16/steve-jobs-confirms-
android-outselling-iphone/)

So I'm guessing that "activation" just means a new device (that can access
mobile internet) being sold to an end user through a retail channel?

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nopassrecover
If I read that article correctly, Jobs should be suing as I can't see anywhere
he confirms the figures.

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naz
Why would he care?

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rthng
I wouldn't have thought he did last time figures were announced but he proved
me wrong by making a deal about the way they counted it.

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Xuzz
Comparing to Apple's 14.1 iPhones million statistic (from the last quarter),
it's about twice what Apple last announced.

Math: 14.1 million / (1/4 * 365) days ~= 150,000 phones

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rbarooah
True, but to compare them assumes that Apple's rate hasn't risen in the
meantime, which is unlikely given that this is the holiday quarter.

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eliben
This articles says that Google is "selling Android..." - does this imply
there's direct profit for Google from each one of these activations?

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simanyay
Yes. If I understand that correctly, if a user activates a phone with Google
that means manufacturer opted into the paid Google Experience package.

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gbhn
Not really. In fact there are lots of non-"Google experience" phones. Pretty
much any phone with an OEM launcher and app package (i.e. HTC Sense) is not a
"Google experience" phone.

There are many devices, though, that don't use Google's activation but which
use Android. It's pretty hard to estimate how many.

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ZeroGravitas
At the 200,000 mark Schmidt clearly stated that they were undercounting
because they only counted some Androids, the ones that come with the Google
store basically.

But since those are the ones being advertised by big brands and sold through
networks I'd guess the undercount isn't that much.

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catch23
number can't be right -- otherwise there'd be more phones activated than
phones manufactured.

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ZeroGravitas
Phones sales in general hit the billion per year mark a few years ago.
Smartphones are a smaller, but growing, segment of that, but the iPhone alone
is doing about half the claimed rate. So why do you find the number so
unlikely?

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cma
With numbers like that, it is hard to fault Gmail for having a few hiccups
lately.

