At today’s Droid x event, Google noted that it was activating 160,000 devices a day.
At Google I/O, just over a month ago, Google announced that it was activating 100,000 devices per day. That was surprising given that the platform isn’t yet two years old. Today’s announcement that Android was activating 160,000 is startling.
Just back of napkin here: That means that every week over a million devices, every month, almost 5 million Android devices go live and extrapolates out to 60 million a year. According to Google (GOOG), there are 60 compatible Android devices, delivered via a global partnership network of 21 OEMs and 59 carriers in 49 countries.
Incredible.
Just to put that into perspective. Apple (AAPL) is about to surpass 100 million of its wildly popular iOS devices sold…in three years. That doesn’t mean Apple is slowing down, however. Apple enthusiastically announced this month that they had 600,000 pre-orders for the new iPhone on opening day and had sold 3 million iPads in 80 days. Apple also sells plenty of iOS running iPod touch devices.
Google also announced that they were open sourcing the Android 2.2 OS Froyo this week as part of their 2.2 Froyo festivities:
To celebrate, we are open sourcing the new 2.2 version of Android, which we call Froyo, to our partners who manufacturer Android devices around the world. Customers will enjoy great new features and improved browser performance. And developers will benefit from new tools such as Android cloud-to-device messaging (which makes it easier for mobile applications to sync data).
Update: Fixed the number of Apple devices sold. Thanks to commenters Henry and Will for pointing out the error.
