Yesterday Furry posted some preliminary number for mobile activations on Christmas: approximately 6.8 million iOS and Android devices were registered on Sunday alone. Unfortunately, the mobile analytics company didn’t differentiate between the two biggest platforms. Google’s Android boss Andy Rubin shed some light on the subject via Twitter, stating that on Christmas and Christmas Eve 3.7 million Android devices were activated in total.

That’s a lot of phones and tablets. On December 20th, Rubin said that Android activations had reached  700,000 devices every day. So assuming an even distribution over Christmas weekend, each day saw about 2.5 times the amount of new devices as is normal – at this point, anyway. The way things are going, Android is likely to reach a million new device activations a day sometime in the summer of next year, assuming that the growth rate continues at its current pace.

An even more interesting question is whether or not non-standard devices are counted. Heavily modified Android tablets like the Amazon Kindle Fire and the Nook Color/Tablet don’t use Google’s servers to authenticate, so presumably they aren’t counted by Mountain View. Since the Kindle Fire alone is estimated to have sold about 4-6 million units since its release in November, the number of expanded Android devices could be much higher. One last fun fact: Android made up about 40% of tablet sales in Q4, so it appears that its inevitable march past a certain fruit vendor has begun in earnest.

5 COMMENTS

      • Where is your math coming from… total 6.8 million.. 3.7million android leaves 3.1 mil ios devicea. Last time i checked 3.7 > 3.1 … so fruit still looses.

      • Where are your reading skills, read the article properly…3.7 Million android phones over the entire weekend for android…6.8 iOS and android activations for Christmas day.. Assuming that only 700,000(I’m sure it’s much more than that) android devices are activated on christmas eve, then we can say that 3 million were activated on Christmas day leaving behind 3.8 million for iOS…so fruit still wins by a lot!!!

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