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, which is live, but totally online, this year.
There are over 3 billion active Android devices
That’s a lot of smartphones
That’s a lot of smartphones
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
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.
The news feels like a flex against Apple, too. Apple announced over 1 billion active iPhones in the wild earlier this year — a mere third of the number of Android devices. It’s a bold reminder that Apple’s smartphone and tablet dominance is largely limited to the United States and a few other regions. For everywhere else, it’s Android.
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