Google's vice president of mobile Andy Rubin has revealed that device activations for Android are now at a whopping 700,000 per day. That's a 40% increase from the 500,000 Android devices per day being activated back in June, and a 27% jump from the 550,000 figure touted during Google's second quarter earnings call in July.
Rubin made the announcement on his Google+ account and later clarified: "For 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."
By comparison, the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs revealed in October that iOS activations stood at 275,000 on average per day. The Cupertino-based company still has a slight edge when it comes to total device activitions, with cumulative iOS sales topping 250 million devices during the most recent September quarter, while the total number of Android devices activated so far is around 200 million. But Google is catching up fast at its current activation rate.
In terms of market share for smartphones alone it's another story. Recent figures from the NPD Group show that Android-based handsets represented a 53% share of the market by the end of October, compared to Apple iPhone's 29%. When it comes to tablets Apple still held a dominant 61.5% share in the third quarter, but that figure is expected to go down with the addition of sales of Amazon's Kindle Fire in the fourth quarter.