Android peaking with 900,000 device activations daily

The Android OS is one of the most popular smart phone OS in the world and statistics project that it will remain the most shipped smart phone OS over the next five years. The growth of the OS is mainly dependent on the shipments of Samsung. Some analysts have even projected that the market share of Android will peak during the year. According to Google’s Andy Rubin, the company is activating more than 900,000 Android devices on a daily basis. The number is impressive since Google used to activate only 200,000 devices daily during the month of August 2010.

 

When taken into count, the total number of Android activations is more than double that of iOS. Google is fast filling the gap in the number of apps available in Google Play. Google currently has approximately 500,000 apps, compared to more than 600,000 apps in the Apple App Store. The launch of the Facebook app store is also expected to give further competition to the app stores of both Google and Apple.

In terms of attracting app developers, Google lags far behind in terms of money. According to Flurry, a mobile analytics firm, a developer is expected to earn $1 for an application in Apple store, while the same application will fetch him 24 cents on Android. Another drawback of the Android OS is that, currently more than three different versions are running, compared to a single version of iOS. This limits the developer’s ability to create applications for the Android Play store.

This achievement is impressive because Google has been able to achieve these results at a time when the global mobile market is not in a good shape. According to industry reports, the global mobile phone market is forecast to grow at a slow pace of only 4.1% in 2012 from 2011, which is the lowest annual growth rate since 2009. All vendors are expected to ship nearly 1.9 billion mobile phones, compared to 1.8 billion units shipped in 2011. This number is expected to touch 2.4 billion by the end of 2016.

 
All this gloom is primarily due to a 10% decline in the feature phone shipments in 2012 and in the coming years. Feature phones are mobile devices, which are generally used for talking and texting only. These phones do not have much of an OS in them. The feature phones still hold a 62% overall market share of the global mobile market.