Just think at its current rate Android (900k+ a day) sells more in 1 year than iphone has in 5 years. Well done Google.
The quote is 900k
activations per day, not sold units. That includes tablets, phones, who knows, maybe even emulators. What about returned handsets? My HTC One X went back, was that an "activation"? I installed several ROMs on it. Were those "activations"? Based on Google's statements, an activation is when the phone is sold to you. But there's no real transparency on how they have tested their activation counting mechanism that I can easily find. In the end, perhaps Apple is at a disadvantage in this pointless 'activation' statistic because they don't report
activations, but rather units sold. However, all android manufacturers I have seen only report units SHIPPED.
In addition to this, most android users I know are dissatisfied with their devices and upgrade on a schedule of about 6 months rather than 24 months like most iPhone users. This means that even if Google isn't fudging the numbers on how many times a device is counted as "activated", more cheap devices are being sold more frequently to less satisfied customers. Customers who basically love their devices for three months, then bemoan their decision to buy it, eventually doing a craigslist to get something else. When the old phones are traded and sold to other people, many believe this also counts as an "activation".
Ultimately, one does not measure the BMW three series against every sedan made in Asia and conclude since there are more Asian sedans, therefore must be a bigger success than the most highly rated, most oft recommended car in the world. You wouldn't even claim that the highest selling car, the Toyota Camry is
better merely based on that one factor. You know, McDonnalds probably has the most sold burger. I guess that means Ruth's Chris should just pack it up and go home?
However, it's still good job Google, as I can think of no other open source OS that has been this widely successful. It is irrefutable that there are more devices running some version of Android than devices running some version of iOS. However, I also can't think of any other open source OS that had a business and revenue model based on advertisements and selling information about their customers to companies for a profit. I'm an old school open source guy from the mid 90s when you posted your address on a BBS good guy greg mailed you a set of black cds with Red Hat 2 and Slackware 3 on it because consumer CD burners were science fiction. So for me, Android is only free to the manufacturers and it turns me into a product Google can sell to advertisers to leverage their search monopoly. So, maybe I'm biased, but to me Google uses the term Open Source as a marketing technique and a market polarizer to give people a fairly intangible reason to prefer their OS over someone else's. Because of this, I just can't count Google's OS as a win for the true intent of Open Source, a collaboration of people who have similar problems and put secrecy aside to accomplish something together while still seeing a net positive to their business as they have lowered costs by spreading the load. Google calls that a "community based" open source product. To me, the greatest accomplishment Google can achieve with their success is to make more people and businesses think about collaborating on community Open Source projects. Who knows, maybe one day we will have an Ubuntu Phone that has no mechanism for user tracking and advertising at all. (I'd probably still get Gentoo Phone tho...)
