MoneyWatch Tech

Android Sales Leap to 100 M a Year: Google Can't Keep Track

By Erik Sherman

Updated on: December 9, 2010 / 9:49 AM EST / MoneyWatch

Just a few days ago, Google (GOOG) announced that it was activating 1.5 million Android devices a week, or around 214,000 a day. A number of observers began elaborate speculations of how Android had hit a plateau.

And then, just a few days later, the number jumped. Google Vice President of Engineering Andy Rubin mentioned on his Twitter account that the company was activating 300,000 Android devices a day. So what the heck is going on? Google's often poor communications. But don't let that blind you to the bigger picture: 100 million Android unit sales next year. At a minimum.

It would have been natural for the company to announce new activations when it introduced Gingerbread, the 2.3 version of Android, on Monday. But that's when Google mentioned the 1.5 million activations a week. A blog post by Rubin confirmed that "more than 200,000 Android devices are activated daily worldwide."
The announcement sent mobile market watchers scrambling for their calculators and looking at the 270,000 iOS devices that Apple (AAPL) reported selling daily back in October. The implications seemed clear:

Android's activation growth is less than 8 percent higher than the number Google cited in August, indicating a plateau in the growth of new Android activations after a summer of impressive growth figures that once swelled by 60 percent within just a month.

Only, they weren't. Now Rubin talks about more than 300,000 daily unit activations, or more than 2.1 million units a week -- just days after mentioning the 1.5 million.

The lower figure didn't ring true when it first came out. Apple has seen steady growth. Even RIM (RIMM) has seen constant growth in BlackBerry unit shipments. There was no reported natural disaster or sudden change in business fortunes among the likes of Motorola (MOT), Samsung, LG, or HTC.

Was Google playing some sort of disinformation game? I don't think so. You could argue that by spacing out the contradictory numbers, the company might have intentionally driven more coverage for Android, essentially expanding the announcement hoopla past a day and through an entire week. And yet, that doesn't ring true, either. And it's not as though Google would suddenly have received a sales report from one of its business partners that recast the count. The company would have its own current activation numbers.

Look at the history of Google and what would make sense is that the company simply screwed up and then realized it when so many pounced on what seemed to be a slow-down. Rubin got one set of figures -- maybe something from a few weeks or even a month ago -- and no one took the extra steps to check the latest numbers.

If the new report is accurate -- you have to ask, at this point -- then Android saw a 50 percent activation growth since August. It isn't the highest rate that Google has experienced (June saw 60 percent month-over-month growth, but that's still impressive between one quarter and the next. It would suggest that Android device sales double roughly every 4.2 months.

At this point, Google sees 27.4 million devices that use Android being activated a quarter -- which means that both the company and Apple are still in the same stride that was clear in the summer. Each will easily top 100 million units by the end of 2011. In fact, should the growth continue even for another two quarters, you could make that at least 150 million, with 200 million by the end of 2012.

Eventually the growth will slow, but given how much room the smartphone and tablet markets have to expand, don't count on the slowdown in the near future.

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