Ten years after its first launch, Android is still setting device records. Today at the I/O developer conference, Google announced that there are currently 2.5 billion active Android devices. It’s a staggering number for Android, and a sign of just how successful Android’s modular approach has been in reaching new users and hardware partners.
There are now 2.5 billion active Android devices
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
“We get to celebrate a milestone together,” said Android senior director Stephanie Cuthbertson onstage at the event.
Since the number is based on Google’s Play Store statistics, it doesn’t include non-Play Store forks like Amazon’s Fire OS or most of China’s Android devices. Google made the announcement as part of the launch of Android Q beta 3.
The number of active devices is growing quickly. Google publicly reached 2 billion active devices in 2017, announced at that year’s I/O conference.
Those numbers also underscore the scale of the fragmentation challenge, as Google looks to apply basic updates and security standards to all Android devices across different versions, regions, and manufacturers. According to the Google distribution dashboard’s October report, just under half of Android devices are running Oreo or Nougat, the two most recent versions of Android. (The report was compiled before Pie adoption took hold.)
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