There are now a million Android devices sold every five days, and that number continues to grow.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt told reporters at the Techonomy Conference tonight that Android had passed the 200,000 unit/day milestone. That’s incredibly up from 160,000 at last month’s earnings call and 100,000 at Google I/O in May. Google (GOOG) has doubled the Android run rate in 4 months.
Schmidt attributed the recent surge to the popular Motorola Droid X which is being marketed strongly by Verizon. He also was excited about the Samsung Galaxy line which is being sold on all networks in the US and in over 100 countries, more than doubling Android’s footprint.
Taking a quote (The TechCrunch video is embedded below):
Our measurements are that we’re activating 200,000 new Androids a day. It was about 100,000 2 months ago. So it’s that growth rate to the 6th, so if current compounding goes it will be bigger than the planet. Some of the reasons for that is the Droid X is so popular now. Samsung just announced the Galaxy and there are many more hardware partners coming. Android is incredibly phenomenal in its growth rate. Remember we make the majority of our money on advertising and the powerful browser that is in Android when people search — they click on ads and that revenue goes to Google. And trust me that revenue is large enough to pay for all of Android activities and a whole bunch more. I should also say we love the success of the iPhone, because the iPhone also uses Google search and we get a good chunk of that revenue when people search on the iPhone. The iPhone, followed by Android, brought about these WebKit-centric browsers that are sufficiently powerful that you can do real mobile computing.
As for a revenue stream, Google makes exactly nothing on the sale of each Android phone directly, but instead confidently said that they were making a significant profit on advertising against Android phones. He added that they also are making money advertising on iPhone in the same manner.
A little math here: At the current rate, Google is selling 18 million Android devices a quarter. If you add up all of Apple’s iOS devices in the just announced quarter, iPods: 9.41 million (half-ish are non-iOS Shuffle, Classic and Nano) , iPhones: 8.4 million (including 1.7 million iPhone 4s) and iPads: 3.27 million you struggle to reach that 18 million.
Technologizer put together Canalys numbers below which seem to agree with that assessment:
Android looks to have passed iOS devices globally and is pretty close to passing Blackberry for number 2.
It is really incredible how fast the Android platform is growing. Remember, the first real Android phone to sell in big numbers was the Motorola Droid, which debuted only eight months ago. Since then, it seems like every month a handset maker ups the ante.
In August alone, Verizon has the Droid 2 and Fascinate. Sprint has the Epic 4G. T-Mobile has this Emerald/Glacier thing coming and AT&T has the the Sony Xperia X10 and Dell Streak. This month also sees the long awaited adoption of Froyo on major handsets like the EVO and Droid.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYO7ZQ3JQmI&w=600&h=375]