Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said that his company now sees approximately 1.3 million Android devices activated per day, up from 1 million in June. Schmidt was speaking at Motorola's press event in New York City yesterday where the Google subsidiary was launching three new Android-based smartphones. Looking back to the end of 2010, Google was activating just 300,000 Android-based devices each day; in May of last year that number rose to 400,000. Of those 1.3 million daily activations, Schmidt said that around 70,000 were for Android tablets, and he put the installed base of Android devices at around 500 million devices.

According to the latest figures, version 4.0.x of Android, code-named "Ice Cream Sandwich" (ICS), now accounts for almost 21% of the total number of Android devices currently in use, an increase of 5 percentage points compared to the same time just one month ago. Although ICS isn't the latest release of Android, it is the one that mobile device manufacturers currently have and it continues to gain ground as they ship new models with it installed and update older phones, such as the Samsung Galaxy S2 and Sony Xperia P.



Version 4.0 of Android is on nearly 21% of Android devices, but Android 2.3 Gingerbread continues to be the most popular version at more than 57%

Source: Google The most recent version of Android, 4.1.x "Jelly Bean", is available on Google's Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 7 tablet, and a few other devices. Its share increased from 0.8% last month to 1.2% as Google shipped more of those devices; this should increase more rapidly in future as more phone manufacturers receive and deploy 4.1 to their new devices or release updates for existing handsets.

The 2.3.x "Gingerbread" branch continues to be the most popular version of Android with 57.5%, down from 60.6%. As expected, other older versions of Android are also still on the decline: Android 2.2 "Froyo" now accounts for 14% of all devices, compared to 15.5% a month ago, and 2.1 "Eclair" is down to 3.7%. Usage of Android 3.x "Honeycomb", 1.6 (Donut) and 1.5 (Cupcake) came to 2.1%, 0.4% and 0.2% respectively.

See also:

Google plans to ease the Android update problem, a report from The H.

(crve)