Android device activations reach 700,000 per day - Page 7

This kind of reasoning is exactly is wrong, gets pretty tiring hearing this argument over and over again. Yes, the single most number of devices sold is Apple. But do you think that is what it will be in the long run? In the end, this is so much like Windows vs Mac. Death by a thousand cuts. If it drops down to 10% and is still the single biggest handset by volume, it has bragging rights, but might not be anything more than that.

A billion, Thats 1000 million. At 7 billion, thats 7000 million. I million is 10*100000. (7000*10*100000)/700000. Thats 10000 days i.e. 273 years assuming population stays the same. Did you use the calculator on your iphone?

Between Windows and the Mac... which one has suffered a death by a thousand cuts?

By your logic... Apple should have scrapped the Mac long ago because they didn't have enough market share. But they didn't scrap it. Why? Because the Mac makes them a decent amount of money. And that's the point you're missing.

Apple made $1.8 Billion in PROFIT on Macs last quarter. Who cares what their market share number is?

Market share is just that... a number. It's a percentage of one thing ranked against the others. That's it. It has nothing to do with the sustainabilty of a business. It's just a ranking.

You know there are companies who post losses in a quarter, right? They have to stand up in front of their shareholders and basically say "we suck... our profit did not exceed our expenses... we're sorry"

Apple doesn't have that problem... and they likely won't in my lifetime. Go ahead and tell us the story of Apple in the 80s and 90s if that makes you feel better.... but Apple is a whole different company now.

The Mac has 5% worldwide computer market share... and makes Apple billions and billions in profit. I don't see a problem with that...


Apple made $5.1 Billion in PROFIT last quarter from the iPhone... and that's with 15% of worldwide smart phone market share.

Tell me why Apple must have the most market share to be taken seriously...

The future of both platform looks bright to me. iOS will continue to be popular among a lot of people while Android is doing the marvelous job of converting feature phone users to Smartphone users. Both complement each other very nicely. To a lot of people, Android is the first car (Toyota or Honda) and iOS is the dream car (Lexus/Ferrari). Yes, Android have some very nice high end phone but truly the numbers are coming from the mid/low range phones. I know this because I work for a Telecom Operator and know the facts. I do not have to "estimate", a quick analysis of IMEIs of the handsets and their usage tells a lot.

I do not see any iPhone or Samsung Galaxy S2 unsold in shelves. Apples market share is leveling as more people are starting to use Smartphone than Apple is selling then. Samsung is utilizing some low priced good phone but they will also see declining market share once others (HTC, LG) come gung ho. It is natural. However, if the total market grew like this, there will be enough space for all large players (Apple, Samsung, HTC, Nokia) to pay around.

Some people are bringing up the example of Microsoft and Apple of the 80s and predicting Apples demise. Let me point out some big differences -

1. Apple have lot more revenue and Cash now. in The 80s, Apple had high per unit profit but sold few units. So, they made very little profit even when they were the "Hot Tech company". Now they are selling millions and earning billions. $80 billion in Cash is no joke. If cornered, they can use this pile to lower price of their products although that will not be necessary in near future.

2. Google is not earning directly from Android. Microsoft on the other hand, earned a hefty amount from each copy of DOS/Windows sold. Google earning a handsome amount from Ad revenue and that will continue. However, it will not matter to Google if they are able to serve at other platforms.

3. Apple was seen as a "good but very expensive" computer maker. Today it is a consumer electronics maker with reasonable price. Yes, iPad is not that costlier than other similar configured Tablets. iPhone is not very much expensive than Galaxy S2. And considering the volume purchasing discounts, Apple can easily lower its price.

All in all, both Google and Apple are smart companies who will continue to do well. We, consumers like to have this as demise of either will be harmful.

While I do own several Apple products what people here fail to see is the past. Learn from mistakes or you are doomed to repeat. Look at history. Apple did make massive amounts of profits in the past but it hit a peak then hit a steady decline. You can only maximize profits for so long but when you lose market share its a cascade effect.

Ugh, you're both wrong. 10,000 days is 27.4 years.

A lot can happen in 27 years...

you always do this...

that's not the f'cking point!

for each highend android smartphone there are lots and lots of free or very cheap models.. stop being so stupid and obtuse please. this is a fact, obviously.

those highends android represent only a fration of android sales, and the proof is that apple outsells all of them together at least 5 for one.

this activation number isn't real (i have already tried dozens of roms, for example) but even with 75pc of activations it shows how many lowend android phones are in the nature.

after a deep analisys they are all lowend for the costumer. almost no one is buying any highend android phone unless they program for android or if they are 30yo basement kids.
obviously a tiny percentage of them are exceptions. maybe they like cheap and junk... maybe they cant buy an iphone.. maybe they tought they bought an iphone.

i really hope that android get-s at least 80% market share.
apple will still sell all iphones they can produce and the iphone will still have their @status@, just like ferrari, and apple will be very competitve.

then, the funny thing will be when the general population goes for round 2, this means>

all (almost) of them have smartphones
the end of this crysis
time to buy another smartphone..

my prediction, this is when android will get killed.
even if no OEM creates their own OS (unlikely due to moto aquisition) or goes for MS or another company, people will know what a smartphone is and what a smartphone can do and believe me, they will want an iphone. it is an fact that 2nd time and 3rd time smartphone buyers go for the iphone (if they can), it is also fact that no one (almost) goes to android after using iphones.

obviously, google is an amazing company. they are evil when they can and that is a pre/requisite for any company, even apple.

no free lunch, right?

humm.. google has a bad plan to capitalize on every android costumer.

Good question. And let's not forget that the absolute sales numbers for iPhones just keep growing.

But it can be flipped around - with growing sales, tons of profits and cash in the bank for Apple, why do fanboyz have to be all defensive every time a data point favorable to Android is released? Take a look at all the denials in this thread alone! I would still enjoy using my iPhone if I am the only one on earth to have one.

You can't possibly believe this. At least, I hope not, for your sake.

Hear hear! Finally, a fair assessment. But I disagree about the harmful bit.

Say what? Steady decline? Maybe you should look at history

Apple has made more money in the last few years than they have in the last few decades.

In case you haven't noticed... the past few quarters Apple has had record-breaking revenue and profit. If you define record-breaking... that means in their entire history.

And FYI... Apple did NOT have the market share advantage in either PCs or phones. (disproving the myth that you must have the most market share to be successful)




Why is everybody so hung up on market share anyway? It's just a ranking... a comparison between 2 or more things. Market share never appears on a balance sheet... and therefore is not a concern to a company. (just forum members )

Apple will never beat Android in market share... but Apple will also never go out of business either. They don't sell as many "units" as the other guys... but Apple makes just enough money to stay afloat. And by afloat... I mean $6 Billion in profit in a single quarter. Plus zero debt... $80 Billion in cash... $108 Billion in yearly revenue.

Repeat... Apple is in the $100 Billion Club. No other cell phone or PC manufacturer has ever come close. (again... market share or money... you decide...)

Apple would REALLY have to screw up to lose this. But I think Apple has already learned from their past.

Until then... go talk to LG and Motorola... they've had many losing quarters in a row. RIM and Nokia aren't doing too well either...

Bottom line... Apple has fully recovered from their problems in the 90's (and then some)

And Apple NOT having the most market share hasn't hurt them one bit.

^^^
This is a very graphic and convincing reason why one should want to buy AAPL, but not Apple.

lol... really. you are a joke.

we are in a time where the people that makes the world go around does not want to know if their computers have 4gb ram or 16. what they want is to their machines (be it computers, tablets, smartphones....) to do their work flawlessly.

I had some computers, i know how they work. you can believe that for us that machine is a mac. we know that this quality has a price and we gladly pay for it. so your point does make sense at all..

mac sales are exploding.
just because apple really knows how to buy and built their components or computers (with much better quality) that does not mean that they should sell them at the same price as HP.
The mac and other apple products are much more than hardware put together. it seems like you don-t understand this..


well, what are you doing in this forum? you are so pathetic.. each post of yours feels like a lame joke. i know that if you post something realted to this post you will forget what was said before the last question, but dont bother... go find a life.

I was talking to the grown-ups. Kindly mind your place in the corner.

Plus we can't forget the supposed 4.4% increase in activations week over week. Math has already been used to show their increase has dropped to 1.3%, but if they were able to maintain a 4.4% increase in activations week in and week out for 3 years, they would be activating over 20M people a day. It wouldn't take anywhere near 27 years to sell an Android phone to every person on the planet, but with no increases, it would take 27 years to sell one to every person currently alive.

If the 4.4% weekly increases were still real, I'd guess somewhere between 5 and 7 years to have enough sales to equal everyone on the planet. Maybe sooner. I don't have an easy way to do the running total at work

EDIT: Ok actually I figured out an easy way to do it. Starting with 700k sales/day for the first week and adding 4.4% every week, after 200 weeks (less than 4 years) there would have been 7,067,269,738 Android sales. Hack the planet indeed.

No, "grown-ups" don't talk like this. Please don't do it again.


Nor like this. Please don't do it again.

I'm curious as to DrDoppio's point that buying AAPL (but not Apple) is a good idea. Could you elaborate?

Sorry, I was using a Windows calculator! It is 10,000 days.

I still can't fathom the idea of 700,000 new activations per day, consistently. I suppose it's possible but it just 'seems' implausible to me.

If my sources (wikipedia) and calculations are right, iOS activations are just above 200,000 per day.

Of course Android is going to have more activations. They have numerous phone models in every price range on every carrier. Duh.

Uggh. More penile comparison stats followed by the same comments you see on every article discussing Android growth.

Why is this growth so surprising? After the tanking of Nokia and Symbian, and the slip-ups of RIM in the last year or so, the failure to launch of Windows Phone 7 and the general growth of the smartphone market, is it really all that surprising that Android activations are hitting 700k per day? Next, look at markets like India, where Apple doesn't really put in the same effort they do elsewhere (no Apple stores, significantly higher prices than outside India, etc.). That's Nokia's key market and they are switching en masse to Android. When you consider that the developed world is nearly a billion souls and the BRIC middle classes are approaching a half billion, and smartphone adoption in these groups is rising rapidly, if even half of this entire set replaces a smartphone every two years, that's easily over a million activations a day. I'm honestly surprised, Android isn't reporting higher. Seems to me that they are starting to plateau.

As for the usual comments...

1) I don't believe Google. Nobody on AI will ever believe anything Google says. So what's the point in even having this debate? They've been pretty clear on what they consider to be an activation and for most reasonable people, that definition is fairly sane.

2) It's not about activations, it's about sales. Depends where you sit. Google cares about eyeballs for ads. They don't sell phones and so they can't discuss hardware sales. For sales stats, you have to talk the OEMs. Again, not a conspiracy, just a business reporting statistics that are relevant to them.

3) This stat means they have more Android devices than iOS devices, so therefore Google is lying. Not true. Asymco just put out analysis that pegs total Android activations at 240 million, within a range of 224 million - 250 million. That should still be smaller than the iOS installed base. The trend does imply though, that at some point Android's installed base may surpass iOS.:

http://www.asymco.com/2011/12/21/how...een-activated/

4) It's all about profit. For whom? As a consumer, I don't give a rat's ass about any company's profit, unless I'm an investor and own stock in them. I find cheerleading on a company's profits (by non-investors) to be absurd. And this is something you only see among tech geeks. How many gearheads go around bragging about how much money their favourite automaker made?

Sure. I was only defending myself, and this was not the first time with this poster.


It's quite obvious -- I would think that it is a good idea to invest in a healthy company with large profits, such as Apple -- or, buy AAPL.

I think I meant more the "not buying Apple" part. Do you mean don't buy Apple products?

Ok, I'll bite. First off, I didn't say "don't buy Apple", I said that the high profits are not a reason to. There are other reasons, such as high build quality, innovative features, or good support. But the fact that Apple keeps next to 30% of the revenue (mind you, after paying for the research that went into the novel features and for the better quality materials) is not the right reason to choose Apple's products.

That's what I think, at least... flame on...

Haha true! AAPL is certainly doing well.

But that chart also shows that people ARE buying Apple. People like Apple products... even if the other guys sell more.

This whole notion that Apple is in trouble because they don't have enough market share is silly. Every time someone mentions Mac vs Windows, or their near-bankruptcy in the 90s.... gosh.

Apple is on a roll because they make good products. Period. I think Apple has already realized their mistakes from 15 years ago... and have completely reinvented themselves.

When I hear "Learn from mistakes or you are doomed to repeat. Look at history" I have to ask... "Have you even been paying attention to Apple lately?

Can you cite any instances of Apple being "evil"?

I have been dealing with Apple for 33 + years (since June 1978)... as a reseller, a client, a consumer, a user, an observer and as a participant in a joint project.

During all those years, in all those roles and thousands of interactions, I have always been treated fairly by Apple -- I trust them with my data and my privacy.

Ok, high profits aren't a reason to buy Apple's products. I don't think anyone is trying to say that you should buy Apple's products b/c of their high profit margin. I think people are saying that b/c of Apple's high profit margin they feel comfortable in Apple's future, which makes it an easier decision to buy their products. Actually, I'm not sure if anyone has even been saying this, but it sure makes a lot more sense to me. If they had small market share and were barely skating by on profits, would their stock or products feel like as good of an investment? If you're worried they could go under from a bad quarter or 2, certainly not.

Only "tech geeks" care about the health of a company yet you state in previous sentence that "unless I'm an investor" so you do realize that people with an investment in a company would care. This isn't just buying stock, but being into an ecosystem as a consumer or a developer. As good as Windows Phone 7 is I'm not going to consider switching until they have secured a solid place in the market. Why is it wrong to hold an investment that works and not get into one that may not be successful? You really think RiM's health shouldn't affect a buyer who is looking to get into a 2 year contract and mobile OS ecosystem investment? That's your folly, not mine.

The odd thing about the this particular failure is that Apple's computers have seen growth in sales and market share and continue to contribute to Apple's bottom line at a margin close to 30%. In fact, in classic B-school parlance if they were not seeing growth computers might be considered a cash cow for Apple. Not at all like, Tandy, Amiga, Sinclair, Wang, or others that got out of the business like IBM which have been failures in the classic sense requiring the selling off of their assets and ceasing sales. If it were not for IBM, I believe Apple might hold the record for continuous production of computers, certainly they hold the longevity record for the production of personal computers. Again not generally an indicator of failure.

You are ignoring the facts if you think market share is the true measure of success. Not only are Apple's margins the envy of every device manufacturer their capitalization exceeds that of each market share leader in their business sectors as well as any consumer electronics manufacturer, further their capitalization exceeds that of Microsoft and Google. I think somewhere along the line your understanding of what it means to be a failure and what it means to be a success got muddled.

Google is tremendously successful at creating devices and services to expand the number of screens and internet properties upon which to display their paid advertising, and as such offering the Android OS for free may be the most successful lost leader program in history. Google is not in the phone business, it is in the media business just as surely as ABC and Fox are in the media business, but instead of producing TV shows to attract eyeballs in order to sell advertising, they create platforms. Android gets reported as the fasted growing mobile platform, but what most people fail to understand is that it is the world's fastest growing media platform and that is what matters to Google. Google doesn't need to make a dime on the Android OS, they need to to attract eyeballs in order to increase the number of impressions and click-throughs so their revenue stream continues to grow. This is why Google continues to develop and test for iOS and MacOS. Android is Google's way of making sure that smartphones make it into the hands of people who can't justify or afford and iOS device. You might think this is about market domination, but it is actually about assured growth.

Flip it the other way... do you care if a company doesn't make profit?

Pretend your favorite carmaker is Saab.

You'd be pretty sad right now...

Rubin didn't state it was 4.4% growth rate 200 weeks ago, he did it only 6 months ago, well after Android OS was established, so the major drop off in growth rate should be of concern to Google and their vendors.

That said, we do need to acknowledge that 1) Rubin's 4.4% w/w comment was during an unusual dry spell when the iPhone was at the end of its expected flagship release cycle, 2) that the significant drop was during the iPhone 4S announcement and release time (even if were only talking about less than half the duration of that cycle), and 3) a drop in growth rate is going to happen even if you saturate a market.

Overall, the question that should be asked is whether 4.4% of 500k is a lower increase per week in activations than 1.4% of 700k. The answer is yes! 22,000 increase per week average 6 months ago compared to only 10,000 additional activations per week average now. That's the really damning evidence here. Only 10k more per week for the entire world for smartphones, PMPs, tablets, and I think there are some notebooks running Android OS now.

I know, I was running the future numbers starting w/the 700k per day comment. So basically this time 2015 is when Android would have had 7B activations (starting fresh from that day) if that 4.4% was something sustainable, but you had already shown it hasn't been.


That being said, 700k increasing to 710k to 720k (roughly) still means over 15M activations in a 3 week period, which is a lot, even if it is a much slower growth. This is kind of like when people were touting the 100+% (and greater) increases Android made when they had an install base of 100k phones and jumped higher. Of course, when you have companies putting Android on low end phones and offering 2 for free to get people to come on board, what do you expect? AT&T sent me a letter trying to get me to sign up and offered me 2 LG Phoenix phones. No interest whatsoever, and I still have LG Lotuses on Sprint until tax time heh. I'd rather wait another month and get the phone I really want.

And here's a fair answer. Posted by 9to5 after a Verge interview with Google reps, it's reported this way, and it's as simple and clear as can be.

"In a clearing up the confusion around Andy Rubins recent numbers releases (here and here), the Verge spoke to a Google source on what constitutes an Android device activation.

Weve now gotten some additional clarification from trusted sources on what Google considers an Android device for the purposes of counting activations (which would presumably apply to every activation count Google has released in the past). Its actually really simple: you need to activate Google services on the device. In all likelihood, Googles counter actually jumps the moment you sign into your Google account on the phone or tablet, whether that be the first time you turn it on or when youre prompted after jumping into something like Gmail or the Android Market. And as Rubin says on Google+, it only happens once per physical device.
It turns out that Google is only counting activations it activates (I know!). It is not counting devices that use Android code, because it does not have control over -or no way of- counting like the Kindle Fire or Barnes and Noble Nook (I know!).

So there you have it. Simple, reasonable and understandable.

So what is a Google service? If a Kindle Fire signs into Gmail from Silk is it not then accessing a service by Google? What about a Nook Color that was rooted and flash with some ROM found on the internet. Does that now become a Google activation he checks his email?

Simply having a Gmail account isn't Google Services which includes the Android Market, Google Maps, and Google Sync which uses your GMail ID to pull all the services together under one account. Now if the Nook is rooted to use stock Android with access to the Google Services suite of products, I could see it now being counted as an Android device based on what I've read. So for giggles throw 1 million Nooks in the figures if it makes you feel more secure in the figures. With 700K activations per day, that 1M is immaterial.

What's more important is that it dismisses the notion that returned and resold smartphones, flashing with 3rd party ROMS, Chinese forked versions and all the other silliness count as Google activations. It's really pretty straightforward.

1) This informations is answering many of the long standing questions that have been asked. That's a good thing. I sure you didn't think it was good to get ambiguous half-truthed answers from Google on this matter.

2) As for making a statement to make me feel more secure. Bite me! I neither need your assistance in formulating an argument nor think that 1M Nook Color users are using custom ROMS.