At the I/O 2019 developer conference in Mountain View, California, Google announced that its mobile operating system Android has passed 2.5 billion active devices.
“We’re here to talk about Android version, 10, and we get to celebrate a milestone together,” says Android product manager Stephanie Cuthbertson. “Today there are over 2.5 billion active Android devices.”
Android passed 2 billion devices in 2017, which means that it added 500 million devices in two years, or 20 million devices per month. In 2015, Android only had 1.4 billion active devices. This means that Android’s growth has remained steady, but not exploding. If the trend continues, Android may hit the 3 billion users mark in 2021.
Google also revealed that 10.4% of all Android installs are already running Android 9 Pie, the latest version of the mobile OS released on August 2018. Android 8 Oreo still has the largest share of installs at 28.3%, followed by Android 7 Nougat at 19.2%.
While Android usage has grown slowly and steadily through the years, it’s still an impressive achievement by Google. To put things in perspective, Facebook has 2.4 billion monthly active users and the number of personal computers worldwide is 1.5 billion.
Google is also investing heavily in KaiOS, a lightweight Linux-based mobile operating system capable of running on devices with 256MB of memory. KaiOS is fast gaining popularity in India where it beat out Apple’s iOS as the second most popular mobile OS.
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