Android activations hit 700K a day

Android activations have topped 700K daily, Google announced this week. 

Earlier this month, Google announced that it was logging 550,000 Android activations a day, up from half a million in June and 400,000 in May. Big numbers, obviously. Here's an even bigger one: 700,000. In a post to Google+ this week, Android chief Andy Rubin said Google was activating an incredible 700K Android devices – from tablets to smartphones – every day, across the world. 

"[F]or those wondering, we count each device only once (ie, we don't count re-sold devices), and 'activations' means you go into a store, buy a device, put it on the network by subscribing to a wireless service," Rubin added in a follow-up message.

That's 400,000 to 700,000 in the space of a few months. So how long can Android sustain that kind of pace? 

Not forever, obviously – there are only a limited amount of smartphone users in the world. Still, Android has continued to lurch forward at a pretty solid clip over the past year, besting Apple in both sales and app downloads. (Perhaps inevitably, Android has also become a magnet for malware. According to one recent report, almost all mobile malware created in the third quarter of 2011 was aimed at Android.) 

The latest Nielsen report puts Android in first place in the US, with 43 percent of the market – six percentage points up from the previous report, and better than Apple, which logged 28 percent. In related news, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt recently told an Italian newspaper that Google will introduce a branded tablet computer in the next six months. 

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[Editor's Note: The original version of this post misstated Eric Schmidt position in Google. He is the executive chairman.]