Google surpasses 500m Android devices activated – 1.3m phones activated daily

12 Sep 2012

Google said today it has achieved the milestone of 500m Android devices activated – which roughly gives it almost half of the world’s 1bn smartphones live right now.

The internet giant also said some 1.3m new Android devices were being activated each and every day.

The announcement comes just hours before rival Apple launches its next-generation iPhone and possibly some new additions to the iPod family.

“Today is a big day for Android … 500m devices activated globally, and over 1.3m added every single day,” Google’s director of product management Hugo Barra boasted on his Google+ profile.

“Oh, and btw, the Jelly Bean statue is back in our front yard :),” Barra said.

It was Barra’s job in July to present the world with the new Android Jelly Bean operating system at Google I/O. At that point, he said the company had surpassed the 400m Android activation milestone.

Connecting the next 5bn people

According to the World Bank, out of 7bn people in the world, 6bn now carry some kind of mobile device. According to IDC, some 1.1bn smart devices were shipped in 2011.

Earlier this year, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt told the Mobile World Congress that there are 2bn people online and that there is an opportunity via smartphones to connect the next 5bn people.

“In the past year, the world surpassed 7bn people. Two billion of these people are online and of these 1bn own smartphones.

“For every person online there are two that are not,” Schmidt noted. He said that today Android smartphones cost $200 on average – in a few years, Android smartphones could cost less than $20, and he wants to put one in every pocket on earth.

“The weak will be made strong and those with nothing will have something,” he told the Mobile World Congress in February.

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com