∞ Has Android stopped growing?

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The mobile fight between Apple and Google has been contentious at times, but recent numbers may show that Android’s meteoric rise may be over.

[ad#Google Adsense 300x250 in story]Writing for Fortune, Seth Weintraub noticed that Google’s daily activation numbers for Android have actually gone down. Google said on Monday, as part of the Gingerbread announcement, that it was activating more than 200,000 Android devices a day worldwide.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in early August that the company “crossed the 200,000 handset/day activation threshold.” That means there has been very little, if any, growth in the last four or five months.

In late October, Apple CEO Steve Jobs made an appearance at the company’s fourth quarter conference call to talk about Google and the iPhone.

“Last week, Eric Schmidt reiterated that they are activating 200,000 Android devices per day, and have around 90,000 apps in their app store,” said Jobs. “For comparison, Apple has activated around 275,000 iOS devices per day on average for the past 30 days, with a peak of almost 300,000 iOS devices per day on a few of those days. And Apple has 300,000 apps on its App Store.”


  • http://twitter.com/aaronmb Aaron Benedict

    Jim, I think that there is a typo in the article. It says that Android’s numbers have gone done. Should it say that Android’s numbers have gone down?

    • http://www.loopinsight.com Jim Dalrymple

      Damn, thanks Aaron. It’s fixed.

    • Anonymous

      Or is it Android IS done?

  • Cris

    I think the water line for Android has been reached. If indeed the iPhone is coming to Verizon, it’s pretty much game over.

  • Anonymous

    I think Google is going to have to do something about the lagging upgrades to Android phones. I think it is causing significant problems to their growth. Users are hesitant to buy a new phone to replace their one year old Android because they don’t know if it will be upgradeable.

    The Droid was released just over a year ago. Many of those early adopters should be looking to upgrade but the question is, upgrade to what? There is no easy answer because the carriers and manufacturers won’t give any assurances that they will provide future updates.

    It is very clear that Apple’s early adopters are on a very fast hardware update cycle. There are many people like me that upgraded to the latest hardware every year.

  • http://twitter.com/Moeskido Moeskido

    Google is indeed going to do something about this. More PR spin… in ads, online forums, and understaffed newspapers. It’s a lot easier than wrangling all the carriers they set free to graze on different bits of Android a year ago.

  • Anonymous

    Android has past the early adopter phase where users would buy 3 phones a year just to get the latest software. The novelty has worn off. And Verizon users are sure they are getting iPhone now. In polls they have said that iPhone is their most desired smartphone, so it wouldn’t be surprising if all Verizon smartphone sales are down right now.