

700,000 Android devices activated each day - arron61
https://plus.google.com/112599748506977857728/posts/PLAaEFy1fNa
Andy Rubin: "There are now over 700,000 Android devices activated every day."<p>"...and 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."
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arron61
Andy Rubin: "...and 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."

So it seems like a new device only.

~~~
jamesaguilar
I wonder why they don't just use a word that people understand.

~~~
arron61
They don't sell the phones so they don't know how many are sold. The only
count they have is all the activations that are coming from every new phone.

I don't think there can be a better measurement for them than this.

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divtxt
Android is taking off here in India because it's creeping into the low-end.
I'm sure the same thing is happening in most countries.

Last week I got a Samsung Galaxy Y. It's small, sturdy, has swype input and
has great battery life. Gmail, reader & facebook over 3G or wifi.

The price: _just $140!!!_

I used to try high-end phones and then go back to low-end Nokias. Now, I'm not
going back to my $40 Nokia and I'm definitely not going to pay $700+ for an
iPhone that won't even have Swype.

 _edit: extra sentence_

~~~
tluyben2
A lot of people are buying, just for the hell of it, Androids from Chinese
outlets like Aliexpress as well. Those are not brands, but they are _really_
cheap; so cheap you don't care at all if they break/fall (I don't agree with
that sentiment, but I know a lot of people do). There are Android 2.3 pads
there for $50 (not to mention hackable Linux phone watches). Now if _only_ you
could upgrade Android without restrictions.

And, while there still is crisis everywhere, I see people selling them here on
markets; they buy them from Alibaba in sets of 20-50 and sell them on a sunday
market to 'fortunate but not as fortunate to pay for a $140 phone'.

Edit: added Linux phone watch, disclaimer; never tried one, but a friend did
and he says it's great fun for tinkering.

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azakai
It's remarkable the legal lengths to which Apple and Microsoft are going to
try to stop Android, but it looks like they are having little or no effect.

Lawyers get paid, some silly patents get worked around, but that's about it it
seems.

~~~
thought_alarm
It's all about the carriers.

A guy walks into an AT&T store and wants an iPhone. He'll get an iPhone.

A guy walks into an AT&T store and wants a Windows Phone. He'll probably be
talked into an Android.

A guy walks into an AT&T store without a clue. He'll walk out with an Android.
It's the most profitable for the carrier, because it's perhaps the only
smartphone left that grants the carrier full control over how it's configured
and what software is bundled.

Patent attacks against individual Android manufacturers and individual models
are irrelevant. Your carrier will always have a wall of indistinguishable
Android phones for the next customer to choose from.

~~~
rjd
Indded, one of my friends went to buy a windows phone recently, c# dev looking
for a phone he could work on.

The clerk literally told him they only have display models and don't hold
stock and that he'd been told not to push them. The clerk couldn't even
organise for a windows phone to arrive at the store so my friend decided he'd
try learning obj-c and walked out with an iphone 3G (as said dev is a jaded
ex-java enterprise programmer and hates the language with a vengeance).

~~~
ars
Seriously? They didn't have the phone he wanted so he let them sell him
something else entirely?

~~~
rjd
From what I got told he asked which store had one and he was told none of them
do, he asked to order one and they said they wouldn't from the store but he
could order online. The guy is a grumpy troll of a man so I would of imagined
him loosing his temper and just demanding something else. I know his old phone
had stopped working so he did have a little pressure to get a phone ASAP, but
yep I raised my eye brows as well considering he is a known to rant about
Apple (but I assume the hate is less than what he holds for java).

~~~
therobotking
That story is quite hard to believe if I'm honest.

I'm guessing a Windows phone developer would own a windows pc and not a Mac as
you say he is known to "rant about apple". Since you need a Mac to
develop/publish for iOS would he really buy an iPhone, learn obj-c and buy a
Mac just because the store he visited didn't stock Windows phones?

~~~
rjd
The bit I found hard to believe wasn't that he ended up an iPhone, it was that
the store was essentially refusing to sell windows phones.

Anyway just dual boot you're desktop its really straight forward these days.

I recently rekitted my workstation to a i5. To install lion was literally as
easy as boot off a USB drive, insert the install lion USB drive, let it do its
thing, grab the associated drivers and put them onto your desktop, run the
MultiBeast tool. Bingo running OSX.

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codex
Android is the new Nokia: the lowest common demonimator phone; the default.
Or, to cross realms, it's the new Windows. While Apple costs carriers a pretty
penny, carriers get a share of the advertising revenue from Android based web
searches, and they can preinstall whatever carrier apps they want on their
Android devices, unlike on the iPhone.

~~~
bad_user
Don't get me wrong, but this argument sounds like sour grapes. Another way to
look at it is that Android is an open platform that people install on anything
they want. And if it's open for users, then it's also open for carriers, which
goes without saying.

Also, if low common denominator phones are anything like my Galaxy S, then
Apple is screwed ;)

~~~
jorgecastillo
"open for users" this is not true, for all intents and purposes, Android is as
open for users as iOS, but unlike Android iOS is not full of bloatware from
the carriers. If you want to get the most out of your Android phone, you have
to install community mods no different from an iPhone. My phone costed $3000
MXN and it was paid in cash, and I feel it was no worth it. I just hope one
day (when my warranty expires) my phone gets a mod, because right now my phone
is not supported. My next phone is certainly not going to an Android one. If
you have the cash go for an iPhone, if you don't maybe Windows Phone is
better?

P.S. Android is definitely the Windows of the smartphone world, but unlike on
PC you can't replace it with the OS of your choice.

~~~
bad_user
With iOS:

* there are no phone models available that allow to root your device without jailbreaking, a process that voids your warranty

* you cannot install software from third-party sources, unless you jailbreak it

* as a developer you cannot distribute software from your website, unless you want to limit yourself to nerds that have jailbroken their device

* you cannot build your own device with iOS on it

* certain classes of software, like phone number blacklists, are banned from the iTunes store, but are allowed on the Android Marketplace

* the source code for iOS is not available. This means no forks are possible (e.g. the Kindle Fire)

PS: don't confuse openness with convenience. Unlike Windows, if Google is
doing such a poor job, you can always fork it, which is why Google has to play
nice. Also, I love my Galaxy S and I only paid $100 for it. And I also own an
iPhone 3GS which is gathering dust.

~~~
tobylane
Android is full of possibilities, but the carriers are often the ones doing
something with this, making it worse for the majority of users. If every
Android user got the next version as quickly as iOS users get their next
version, and it was as clean as Google wanted, their phones would be massively
improved.

~~~
nmridul
Do you really have to depend on your carrier ? Most of the phones are
available in the open market, with a higher price tag.

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rjd
Does anyone else look at these numbers and instantly think of the shear volume
of waste?

With iphones thats a well over million per day. With most people already
owning a phone thats a lot of superseded devices to deal with. Thats a lot of
chemical waste...

~~~
cryptoz
I think the vast majority of these users are probably on their first
smartphone. For example, Android is huge in African countries where families
who've never owned a computer are starting to sign up for cheap 3G plans with
cheap Android phones.

I bet there's a lot of waste, but I also bet that it's _nothing_ compared to
the waste from old American cars driving around and polluting. Think of what
these new cheap smartphones mean for humanity - the ability for entire
populations to pop on the internet that never have before, read wikipedia,
etc. Surely that is worth the waste it is producing.

~~~
rjd
I wasn't really referring to the 'carbon footprint' if thats why you brought
cars into it. I was more referring to things like PCBs and batteries, and the
chemical processes used in refining these things. Toxic and harmful chemicals
appearing in ecosystems they shouldn't... when things like cell phones don't
get reprocessed properly.

~~~
swombat
There are plenty of toxic chemicals in car manufacturing. Hell, cars
(particularly old ones) produce these toxic chemicals continuously while you
drive them! Smart phones are a hell of a lot less toxic than cars.

As for the comparative benefits, we could argue until the cows come home -
both products are insanely useful and life-changing - but if we simply
declared them equally useful, that would make phones a better bargain due to
the much smaller amounts of toxicity.

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byoung2
I wonder what number of distinct users is. Once you go Android, you tend to
stay there. Between my wife and me, for example, we have had 6 Android phones
(1 HTC Hero, 2 HTC Evo 4Gs, 3 HTC Amaze 4Gs), and 5th Android tablet (2
Samsung Galaxy Tabs, 1 Asus Transformer, 1 Acer Iconia, and 1 T-Mobile
G-Slate). I'm sure each activation was recorded, but there isn't really a way
to deactivate a device. Even a factory reset appears to be restricted to the
phone, and doesn't register anything with the carrier/Google.

~~~
Aloisius
Goodness. Why do you own so many phones & tablets?

~~~
trafficlight
I think the basic idea is "one is good, six are better".

~~~
throw_away
getting a screen extender to stitch together all eleven devices (don't forget
the five tablets) would be amazing.

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theSuda
I guess these numbers will increase as mobile vendors provide better ROMs with
their mobiles. I bought a LG Optimus one to get started on Android (a year
ago)and I got sick of its LG ROM in two weeks flat. Then I rooted it and put a
custom ROM from XDA forums (with a custom optimised Kernel). I couldn't be
more happier with my mobile's performance than this. Also I hear some new
models of LG, HTC, Samsung have minimal default apps and lightweight ROMs now.
So people don't have to be frustrated with un-removable built in apps and crap
default home launchers. This will certainly get usability freaks (like me)
interested.

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danielharan
That sounded way too high. But then, holy crap: 1 billion people buying a
device once every 3 years is ~ 1 million a day.

Wow.

~~~
diminish
2 years is a better interval.

~~~
whatusername
Not over 1 billion people it's not.

There's a lot of families that use hand-me-down phones.

Consider the scenario where Mum gets a new Phone every 2 years and Dad gets
her old one when she's done. The phone has a 4 year life.

Averaging it out (over the richest 1billion people in the world) and 3 years
is possibly a pretty close figure.

~~~
cryptoz
I highly doubt the richest 1 billion have anything at all to do with the
majority of Android phone purchases. Countries like Nigeria (140,000,000
people) and Kenya (40,000,000 people) are starting to see their populations
going from no-computers to everybody-has-a-smartphone. Most people there may
never own a PC but will move straight to cheap, open source smartphones.

I would bet that Android's growth numbers are a majority of new users and a
minority of returning users. The platform's only been popular for a single
"update cycle" anyhow. 3G networks are popping up in the poorest parts of the
world and people are buying phones there.

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X-Istence
And these numbers are the reason why Android development is going to be a
royal pain in the butt for a long time to come.

There is just no incentive for Google to change the developer tools to be more
developer friendly, to be more powerful when developers are forced to release
an Android application simply because it is the platform with the most users
on it. Despite the fact that from a development standpoint it is a nightmare
due to differing hardware/software to the point that shops that want to
develop for Android have to have 30+ devices just for physically testing. The
Android emulator is absolute crap because of timing difference a bug can
manifest itself in the emulator and not on the phone and vice-versa.

Not only that but the quality of applications on Android devices is simply not
up to par with the quality of the same applications on the iPhone. It says a
lot when Twitter and Facebook wholesale take their UI designs/decisions and
put them on Android devices from their iPhone counterparts.

~~~
psychotik
Amen. I wish they also included how many different variants of Android were
actually being shipped, and what version each one was. _Those_ numbers would
make us developers tremble.

With iOS, it's simple -- if a million iOS devices were activated today, I'd
know they all ran the exact same version of iOS 5.x, and none were customized
or bastardized by OEMs. At least on that front, I'm thankful to Apple (I can
write a whole other rant about iOS' crappiness too, but that's not relevant
here)

PS: Here's an example of how Android EMs screw over apps/devs:
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5358014/android-
httpclien...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5358014/android-httpclient-
oom-on-4g-lte-htc-thunderbolt)

~~~
X-Istence
I recently read this: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3362072> a post by
user "calloc" which I find quite interesting. I personally work for Absio Corp
(<http://absio.com/>) and we do Android development for the DoD and we too
have found many of the issues that I've mentioned above and that calloc has
found as well. At the moment we are testing on the Evo 4G, Photon 4G, Samsung
Galaxy S II, and the Droid X, with a couple of other devices mixed in. I
believe we also got a new Galaxy Nexus that we are testing on.

It's a pain, and we've had issues with bugs only cropping up on one device but
not another (even if they have the same Android version).

~~~
babebridou
The current strategy for android is to keep pushing the device level up
through app developers rather than through carriers. I'm now at a point where
I do all my devs targetting Ice Cream Sandwich and including the compatibility
packages for older versions. This does not fix all of the fragmentation you're
referring to yet, but it's a very definitive step forward. Of course, this
essentially means that potentially all my apps are carrying the same patch of
the OS with them...

Anyway about 80% of my previous fragmentation issues were solved with ICS. The
remaining 20% though, are the truly hard ones!

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pbreit
I'm sure the number is accurate and kudos to Google but, wow, who the heck is
activating all these devices? From the people I run into I would estimate the
iOS:Android ratio at 10 or 20 to 1 (San Francisco).

~~~
gbog
Observation biais.

Estimations from China:

\- In my office, a Web company: Android vs iOS is maybe 30 - 70

\- In the subway, Android vs iOS is more like 80 - 20.

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16s
That's roughly 250 million per year.

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sunkencity
How are they certain it's not 400' doing a factory restore or rom flush?

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samstave
That is only 10,000 years before all of humanity has one...

~~~
divtxt
I think you mean 10,000 _DAYS_ (which is still 27.4 years).

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dave1619
If Steve Jobs was still around he would not be happy about this.

