The Samsung Galaxy S III
Just before Apple’s WWDC kicks off this week, Google let fly with a tasty little nugget that its Android smartphone OS is achieving 900,000 activations daily. Google’s head of mobile Andy Rubin has also denied he is leaving to join a mysterious new start-up called CloudCar.
Responding to a rumour that began with a tweet by Silicon Valley blogger Robert Scoble, Rubin denied he is planning to leave and added the latest benchmark in Android activations.
He tweeted: “No plans to leave Google. Oh, and just for meme completedness – there are over 900,000 Android devices activated each day.”
This is up from the 850,000 daily activations rate Rubin announced at the GSM Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February.
Little is known about CloudCar except that it is part of Rubin’s own incubator effort.
More than eight out of 10 smartphones shipped during the first quarter were powered by iOS (23pc) and Android (59pc) operating systems, according to IDC. During the first quarter some 152.3m smartphones were shipped.
Android finished the quarter as the overall leader among the mobile operating systems, accounting for more than half of all smartphone shipments. In addition, Android boasted the longest list of smartphone vendor partners. Samsung was the largest contributor to Android’s success, accounting for 45.4pc of all Android-based smartphone shipments. But beyond Samsung was a mix of companies retrenching themselves or slowly growing their volumes.
