Android Activations Top 10 Million Per MonthAndroid Activations Top 10 Million Per Month

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Rochester, N.Y., has a population of 207,000. Syracuse, N.Y., has a population of 139,000. Add those populations together, and you get about 350,000, which happens to be the current number of Android handsets that are activated every day.

Google took a few moments during its earnings call on Thursday to show off some Android-related stats. At the rate of 350,000 per day, Google is selling more than 10 million Android phones per month. That's a lot of phones. Android's momentum has taken it from zilch to the biggest smartphone platform in the U.S. in two and a half years. Perhaps Google has sufficient reason to be smug, as it has surpassed RIM's BlackBerry platform and Apple's iPhone by a growing margin.

Does that mean Google is winning the smartphone war? That depends on your point of view. Sure, Android is now the top smartphone platform, but Google doesn't sell smartphones--its partners do. Nielsen reported earlier this year, "An analysis by manufacturer shows RIM and Apple to be the winners compared to other device makers since they are the only ones creating and selling smartphones with their respective operating systems."

That means Apple and RIM make profits on everything related to their operating systems and devices--not just one or the other.

Google is, however, king of mobile ad impressions, which it is surely happy about. Android just chalked up its fourth consecutive month as the top platform when it comes to advertising, according Millennial Media's most recent report. Android won 48% of mobile ad impressions. Apple's iOS followed with 31%, and RIM came in third with 18%.

Google also noted that Android device users have downloaded and installed three billion applications from the Android Market. The growth of app downloads is outright staggering. Google indicated that it took about 20 months for it to serve the first billion apps. The next billion took one-fourth the time--just five months. The third billion took a mere two months to achieve.

Android handset users are downloading applications at the rate of 500 million per month. To put that into a little perspective, it is the same as saying Android users are downloading 16.66 million apps per day, 695,000 apps per hour, 11,500 apps per minute, or 193 apps per second. It's a shame Google didn't include more data about the breakdown of free versus paid apps, and where those apps all came from.

Apple's App Store for iOS devices crushes the Android Market, though. In January, Apple announced that more than 10 billion apps have been downloaded. Its store carries about 350,000 apps, which is twice the number of the Android Market, which is somewhere near 180,000. iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch users downloaded five billion apps in the six-month period between July 2010 and January 2011.

Surely Apple has seen another two or three billion downloads since January, and the rate is probably one billion downloads per month (or 33.33 million apps per day, 1.3 million apps per hour, 23,000 apps per minute, or 386 apps per second).