Nearly six months ago, on June 28th, Android chief Andy Rubin told us that 500,000 Android devices were being activated daily. On December 20th, he gave up an update: 700,000 Android devices were being activated every single day. Because those two dates are exactly 25 weeks apart, you can calculate the average rate at which Android activations have increased.
Things have changed since Andy claimed activations were increasing at a rate of 4.4 percent per week. Since June, they’ve increased at about 1.35 percent every week — or, more importantly, slightly faster than 0.192 percent per day. Using that number, you can calculate the number of activations for any period of time after June 28th.
Apple’s fourth calendar quarter started on September 25th and ends on December 25th. If you apply the daily percentage increase throughout that 92 day period, Google will have activated 59,653,187 Android devices by the end of Apple’s fourth quarter.
To gauge iOS devices sales, we’ll rely on Horace Dediu’s numbers and both of Andy Zaky’s estimates. An average of their estimates gives us 34.23 million iPhones, 14.4 million iPads, and 16.53 million iPods. However, you can’t count all iPods because they don’t all run iOS. Since Apple says that “over half of all iPods sold” are iPod touches and my data shows that the average selling price of an iPod has been higher in the holiday quarter ever since the iPod touch debuted, we’ll assume that 65 percent of the iPods that will be sold in the fourth quarter are iPod touches. Using those numbers, Apple will sell 59.38 million iOS devices, slightly less than devices running Android. But, if Apple does report “the largest blowout in company history”, then Apple will outsell every Android vendor combined.
Note: Special thanks to Alan Nash for giving me the idea for this post.