After a stratospheric rise this summer, Google has been stuck at around 200,000 activations a day since early August.
Update: (Dec. 8th) Well, it looks like Google’s numbers aren’t flat. They just waited a little while to report them.
Google’s (GOOG) Android has been on a tear lately, dominating growth in the smartphone market in just about every major survey. But amongst the Gingerbread hoopla today, the number of Android activations has to be a disappointment. They are still at “over 200,000/day.” To be specific, Google has said they are activating 1.5 million phones a week, which is about 214,200/day. Still, that is almost no acceleration since early August.
On August 4th Eric Schmidt told a crowd of reporters that Android had crossed the 200,000 handset/day activation threshold. That was a continuation of significant growth throughout the summer. Just a month and a half earlier, on June 23, Google Announced 160,000. A month before that, at Google I/O they were at 100,000 activations a day.
Andy Rubin, Google’s Android head, said in an interview in early October that they had a single day when Google had activated 250,000 smartphones.
But with the release of Gingerbread, Google still hasn’t announced anything significant. Still 200,000/day. You’d think the Gingerbread announcement would be an opportune time to update the numbers if growth had warranted it.
That isn’t to say Google won’t announce another milestone in the coming days and weeks. But, even if they announce 250,000 next week, that still shows that growth is decelerating.
As Google CEO Eric Schmidt mentioned when he announced the 200,000/day figure in August, Android can’t continue to grow at the rate in which it was growing over the summer. If it did, it would outstrip the world’s population in a few years.
