What just happened? Microsoft Word has long been the software of choice when it comes to creating text documents on desktop, and it seems the mobile version is proving just as popular. The Android edition of the program has just passed a huge milestone: over 1 billion installs.
According to the Google Play Store and first reported by Android Police, the Word app has now been installed “1,000,000,000+” times. This makes it the first Microsoft app to reach the one-billion milestone, and it was the first to reach 500 million installs, too.
That one billion figure doesn’t consist solely of downloads from the Play Store. Microsoft has agreements in place with several manufacturers, including the world’s number one smartphone maker, Samsung, to preinstall its apps on some of their devices.
Microsoft will no doubt be happy with how its apps are performing on Android as a whole. Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and OneDrive all have over 500 million installs, while Outlook has over 100 million. Additionally, Word has an average 4.5 out of 5 rating from 3.5 million reviews, so there are plenty of people happy to use it.
Taking into account all the uncounted installs that use the standalone APK file, as well as the millions of installs on iOS, Word is one of the most popular productivity apps on mobile devices.
Last month saw former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates say that his greatest mistake was losing in mobile to Android. “There’s room for exactly one non-Apple operating system and what’s that worth? $400 billion that would be transferred from company G [Google] to company M [Microsoft].”
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https://www.techspot.com/news/80950-microsoft-word-installed-over-one-billion-times-android.html
