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Android Google

There Are Over 3 Billion Active Android Devices (theverge.com) 66

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
There are over 3 billion active Android devices in the wild now. Sameer Samat, VP of product management at Google, announced the news at Google I/O 2021 today. From a report: Google added over 500 million active Android devices since its last developer's conference in 2019 and 1 billion devices since 2017. (That was when it hit the 2 billion mark.) The number is taken from the Google Play Store, which doesn't take into account devices based on Android but that use alternative stores, including Amazon Fire devices and the myriad of Chinese Android-based devices that avoid using Google's apps altogether. That means the number of active Android devices is likely much higher than what Samat announced on the live stream.
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There Are Over 3 Billion Active Android Devices More

There Are Over 3 Billion Active Android Devices

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  • But . . . (Score:5, Funny)

    by Joey Vegetables ( 686525 ) on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @01:54PM (#61397442) Journal
    Linux will never work for mass-market devices.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by NFN_NLN ( 633283 )

      "People will never stop making up quotes on the internet." - Abraham Lincoln

    • There will be some say that Android isn't a Real Linux OS, but a different OS running the Linux Kernel.

      What a lot of people call Linux, is more commonly called GNU/Linux. But Linux is to Android is like BSD is to iOS.

      • Linux is just the kernel. Every distro rolls their own the way they like. Think about how many embedded busybox devices there are out there? I once compiled my own to load on a WRT router after playing with OpenWRT for a while. Then I started building busybox on CF cards. This was loong before raspberry Pi. Some people dabble in isolinux to either make run-from-flash images, others do it to build custom bootp servers with menu options for installations. They are all linux kernels and more linux than they ev

    • Linux will never work for mass-market devices.

      ... nobody's ever said that.

      • I wish that were so.

        But I still hear it or something like it today. Even in this very thread.

        What they might more accurately say is that typical Linux distributions are a suboptimal fit for typical Windows users, especially if they run software or hardware that only supports Windows, which there still is plenty of, although less and less each year.

        Or that the freedom and hence choice available to users of Linux and other free operating systems can be overwhelming to new users.

        These would be reasonable poin

        • The reason nobody thinks Linux is ready for the desktop is the user interface. The picture people have in their heads of a 'Linux smartphone' better resembles Windows Mobile/CE devices (i.e. desktop shrunk down) than the fully-rebuilt-from-scratch iPhone'ish UI Android phones use today.

          Using Chromebooks or Android to brag about Linux being brought to the masses is like bragging about how many times you've been laid... by hookers.

          • Which user interface?

            Some are quite Windows-like. Others are not. Most can be configured to be either. I use XFCE4 in close to the default configuration. It doesn't look exactly like Windows, but it's close enough that I have no trouble moving back and forth between the two.

            The real obstacles I see are (a) the proliferation of options and choices rather than the "one size fits all, eat what you are given" mentality of Windows, and (b) incompatibility with Windows-only hardware and software. Neither is

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by cusco ( 717999 )

            The Chinese and Indian Linux distributions have settled on an XP-clone interface for their systems, and it appears to be acceptable to end users. The state of Kerala alone saved something like $400 million in MS licenses, with minimal disruption. The big sticking point that I've seen are the gigantic Excel spreadsheets that seem to evolve like something alive which the various open source spreadsheets choke on, but most of those things should have a stake put through their heart and be replaced with a dat

            • A slight segue, but this is my experience with the abuse of MSOffice docs, which now goes back nearly 3 decades.

              Most of the table-heavy Word docs should be using or embedding Excel worksheets.

              Most of the dozen-or-more-tabs Excel workbooks laden with cross-worksheet references and formulas, that break when you insert a row or sort something, should be Access databases.

              Most of the abominations consisting of hundreds of not normalized tables spanning multiple Access databases should be actual applications, des

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by cusco ( 717999 )

                I've always thought that the reason Excel spreadsheets got so bloated was because the interfaces to all the DB products sucked so badly.

                • Access, Paradox, xBase, and FileMaker were just some of the efforts to provide quasi-relational database products easy enough for typical end users to use effectively.

                  My take is that a lot of folks could not be bothered to learn the relational model, and even today, and even amongst developers, that remains the case much more often than not.

                  So they ended up re-inventing it, but very, very poorly.

  • The requisite hourly story about how Apple is a monopoly who victimizes small innocent businesses like Epic and Google.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by NFN_NLN ( 633283 )

      Next on slashdot, brand loyal cucks keyboard smashing from their parents basement defend predatory practices of multi trillion dollar companies that don't care about them.

      • Or worse. The idea of trying to make the server UI so simple companies either lay off their IT staff or the ones they have are no where near as clever ad they should be. They just wander through menus till they stumble on a setting somewhere. It was bad for our business when the stated goal is to put you out of work. Never understand that loyalty. There is no stopping that existing in business but why be loyal. Thats like plumbers pointing you to home depot and YouTube videos. If they can do it fine, but im

    • Re:Next on /. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @02:24PM (#61397522) Homepage Journal

      Approximately nobody argues that Apple is a monopoly. People argue that Apple has violated antitrust laws and has enough market power for those violations to seriously adversely affect consumers. A monopoly is neither necessary nor sufficient for violating antitrust laws.

      • I see amazon as a bigger one though. Sofar apple isnt building spacecraft. I think the apple self driving car is dead (i hope). There is a limit to how much i want to do business with one company. A bookstore turned Sears Robuck catalog (amazon) should not be attempting to invade every aspect of my private life or my commerce. If apple loses a deal they dont go spike the well and poison everyone else (amazon has now fucked over two government timelines simply because they had the nerve to pick a different c

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dgatwood ( 11270 )

          Oh, no question about it. Amazon has far more power over the average consumer in the broader sense, and far more potential for abuse, at least in theory.

          Amazon's saving grace is their general lack of competence, from their search engine that is so bad that I'm constantly searching Amazon using Google, to how hard it is to quickly report problems that should get someone's attention without wasting fifteen minutes on a chat session, to the complete chaos of low-quality products proliferating on their platfo

    • Took the words right out of my mouth. Apple has 30% of the phone market. They don't have a monopoly on anything.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        Apple has 30% of the world phone market, mostly because of extremely low-end devices (usually running older versions of Android) that are available cheaply in lower-income countries where Apple doesn't even try to compete.

        Apple has 60% of active U.S. mobile devices, which is all that U.S. law really cares about.

      • 30% of the phone market, but that accounts for 70% of app revenue

        It's not a market most app developers can afford to ignore.

    • Apple holds its customers inside their walled garden. Android users are held as second class friends by those with iPhones, amiright? Experience open. Contribute to it. Success is selling something to the public that they didn't know they already had... and charging more for it.

  • feel like a nuclear weapon statistic?

  • 3 billion active Android devices ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Yeechang Lee ( 3429 ) on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @02:10PM (#61397488)

    ... and 2.99 billion of them no longer get system updates

  • Herpes (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    There are over 3 billion active herpes infections in the world. It must be good, right?

  • I still have a Google Nexus One which I use every day.

  • Is anyone working on a vaccine for this?

  • 2.9 billion with old versions (Score:3)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @03:22PM (#61397706)

    Alas.

  • The thought of three billion people being constantly tracked and spied upon by a single corporation is depressing.

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