Google’s Play Store Hits 25 Billion App Downloads, Kicks Off Five Day Sale To Celebrate

Well, that didn’t take too long. Google has just announced that it now has another app-related milestone under its belt. According to a new post on the official Android blog, the Google Play Store has crossed 25 billion app downloads; in case you’re the type to keep track of these things, the news comes just six months after Apple’s App Store hit that same milestone.

As usual, Google has chosen to commemorate the occasion with a slew of app discounts to push that number of downloads even higher for the next five days. According to a post on Google’s official blog, titles from developers Gameloft, Electronic Arts, Rovio, runtastic, Full Fat (just to name a few) will be among those being sold for a scant $0.25 starting later today. On top of that, Google also plans to push out some other special content bundles over the coming days — think collections of 25 must-own movies, albums, and banned books.

If the announcement sounds a bit familiar, it’s probably because Google has been awfully vociferous about its Play Store momentum lately. Sergey Brin’s stunning mid-air Glass demo may have stolen the show, but Google offered up some interesting Google Play Store statistics back at Google I/O in June — at the time, the company revealed that the Google Play Store had hit 20 billion installs, and saw over 1.5 billion app downloads per month. That’s a pretty solid jump from the roughly 1 billion downloads per month the Google Play Store saw back in late April/early May when it crossed the 15 billion download barrier, and at this point there’s no sign of that download momentum faltering any time soon.

That growth in downloads is no doubt tied to a bump in Android device activations, and there’s been no shortage of those either — Android chief Andy Rubin tweeted earlier this month that Google was seeing 1.3 million Android device activations per day (up 400,000 from Rubin’s last congratulatory tweet back in June). Couple that with the potential for strong holiday sales thanks to hardware partners like Samsung, HTC, Motorola, and Asus (that Nexus 7 should top many a wish list) and it shouldn’t be long at all before Google sees 30 billion app downloads in the rear-view mirror.