The number of active Android smartphones is approaching 1 billion

The number of devices on the Android operating system has reached 750 million, Google’s executive director said in connection with the departure of Andy Rubin from the post of head of the Android division. 

Yesterday, March 13, it became known that the place of Rubin, who led the work on the mobile platform of the search company since 2004, was taken by the vice president of the Chrome and Google applications division, Sundar Pichai (Sundar Pichai). Pichai has been responsible for browser development since 2008.

Larry PageLarry Page, the head of Google, said that Rubin’s departure is connected with his desire to do something new in the company, “to start a new chapter.”

In connection with the statement, Page also spoke about the new achievements of the platform. Today, more than 60 companies produce Android devices, about 750 million gadgets have been activated on the company’s OS (in September 2012 there were 500 million), 25 billion applications have been downloaded from Google Play.

As noted on the pages of Techcrunch, Android is by far the world’s largest smartphone platform. Gartner, for example, estimates the share of the platform at 70% of the number of devices sold in the world.

Activation, according to analyst Benedict Evans from Enders Analysis, is a less accurate parameter than sales, since in this case devices in those countries where Google Play does not work are not taken into account. In addition, this indicator does not take into account the figures of the secondary market. 

In any case, as Evans notes, the active Android base is about 675 million users “plus China”. For comparison, iOS has about 400 million users.

According to Horace Dediu, by the middle of this year, the number of active Android devices will reach 1 billion.