Well now that we know that Android is the most popular US mobile OS, (activating 200,000+ phones a day) this news doesn’t seem that surprising.

Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt recently confirmed to Newsweek that Android is already a profitable entity. Now this doesn’t mean that all of the profits com from Android directly, but with all those phones being sold per week, they generate enough advertising revenue to cover the costs for development.

So where does the 10 billion figure come from? Well Schmidt didn’t give a timeline, but he fully expects there to be one billion Android phones in the world and if each phone generated just $10 per user per year, bingo bango, that’s a $10 billion business. Not to shabby for a 200MB OS with 11 million lines of code.

Hit up the link for the four-page Newsweek article.

[via Newsweek]