Andy Rubin: Google activates 300,000 phones every day | Hacker News Reader

Andy Rubin: Google activates 300,000 phones every day

tech.fortune.cnn.com

41 pointsandre3k123 comments

Wow, that's almost 110 million devices per year!

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

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

One can only hope that something with a web browser as good as android's will become the lowest common denominator for a phone OS.

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.

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".

Apple only talks about iOs devices sold (not iPhone, iPad, etc...)

"...14.1 million iPhones in the quarter...4.19 million iPads during the quarter..." -- http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/10/18results.html

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.

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...

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?

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

Why would he care?

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.

It's not the point? You can't just say "x officially confirms y" when that is factually untrue. Blatant hyperbole from mediocre "journalists".

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Don't the HTC Sense phones still come with access to the official Google Market and with the official Google apps (mail, maps etc.) pre installed. If so then they are official Google blessed phones which activate via Google activation

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

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?

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

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