Google’s Andy Rubin: 300,000 Android devices activated daily

By Aemon Malone December 9, 2010

Android powered devices continue to be activated at a fast pace, according to Andy Rubin, Google’s vice president of engineering. “There are over 300,000 Android phones activated each day,” Andy Rubin tweeted in just his second posting ever to his Twitter account.

Rubin’s tweet follows news that Android activations appeared to be leveling off at a clip short of Apple’s iOS activations. Just a few days ago, during the Gingerbread 2.3 release event, Google announced that its Android activations were currently averaging 1.5 million per week, which equates to about 214,000 per day — more than a few tens of thousands short of Rubin’s 300,000 figure.

Google had stated four months ago that around 200,000 Android activations were occurring daily. In October, Steve Jobs announced around 270,000 iOS devices were being activated per day.

It’s not clear if Rubin’s figure is based on new data that was unavailable to Google when it announced the 1.5 million activations earlier this week.

If Rubin’s figure is taken to be the closer to the actual number, then Android’s popularity is still on the rise — not plateauing as it appeared to be just a few days before. Android’s success has been fueled by the fact that there are variety of phones running the OS across several different carriers. Samsung recently claimed that it has sold over one million of the Android-power Galaxy Tabs, which also is helping to boost Android’s popularity as an OS.

According to some number crunching by Apple Insider, even if Android is now running at a 300K per day clip, Apple’s iOS has likely been experiencing growth of its own during the past few months — enough to top Android in the daily activations department.

Officially, Android is placed as the second most popular mobile operating system in the world behind Nokia’s Symbian, according to a third-quarter report issued by Gartner. Apple’s iOS ranks third and is followed by Research in Motion’s Blackberry in fourth place.

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