Android Now Has 1.4 Billion 30-Day Active Users Globally

Google’s mobile platform now has 1.4 billion 30-day active users globally. Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed the new Android-related data point at its Nexus event in San Francisco today.

At its developer event in June 2014, Google announced it had hit more than 1 billion monthly active users on the Android platform. Prior to that, Mountain View had released cumulative figures for Android activations — announcing it had hit 900 million activations in June 2013, when it was adding some 1.5 million new devices per month, and passing the 1 billion activated Androids mark by September 2013.

This summer analyst Gartner’s latest smartphone market figures recorded the slowest ever year-over-year growth for Android — suggesting Google’s mobile platform has hit peak penetration, taking around 82 percent of the global smartphone market in Q2 this year.

However Pichai talked up Android’s growth in emerging markets, saying usage has “literally doubled” in certain markets over the last year — name-checking Indonesia and Vietnam.

“We’ve added 400 million active devices and the momentum is happening around the world — especially in emerging economies. In many, many places. In countries like Indonesia and Vietnam Android has literally doubled in the last year. And what’s exciting about this is in most of these cases these are people who are adopting a smartphone for the first time,” said Pichai.

“We are well on the way to bringing the next billion users online,” he added.

He also touched on Android One, Google’s push to drive higher quality smartphones for a lower price point. “We’ve expanded the program to many countries,” he noted. “We’ve recently launched it in Turkey about a month ago and General Mobile’s Android One phone has been the best-selling phone in Turkey since then.”

Pichai also talked up Chromebook momentum in U.S. schools. “We’re beginning to see the same momentum outside the U.S. as well,” he said. “In the U.S. we were looking at data in September, every single day there are 30,000 new Chromebooks which get activated.”

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