mangosquash

Yesterday, Daring Fireball Shared a link to a Matt Richman post which used some calculation to assert that iOS daily activations are outpacing Android daily activations. Based on my numbers, It’s close, but I don’t think that this is the case.

Yesterday, Apple announced that they sold 37,040,000 iPhones and 15,430,000 iPads during Q1 2012. This quarter spans 98 days (14 weeks, Sept. 25 – Dec. 31) rather than the standard 13 week, 91 day Quarter. That’s 52,770,000 iOS devices sold/activated over a 98 day period. There are two obstacles to comparing iOS to Android activations/day:

iPod Touches sold

To determine the number of iPod Touches sold, I was conservative: Apple said over 50% of all iPods sold were iPod Touches, so I calculated it at exactly 50%. 15,400,000 iPods were sold. I assumed that 7,700,000 of them were iPod Touches. Using this calculation, Apple sold 60,170,000 iOS devices over 98 days, coming out to 613,979.6 devices/day. (if you assume iPod Touches were 60% of iPods, the number comes out to 629,693.9 activations/day, 75% would be 652,755.1/day. If 100% of iPods sold were iPod Touches – and we know they aren’t – the number would be 692,551 iOS devices sold per day).

Android Data

To determine Android Devices sold/day, I used even less scientific measures: Andy Rubin’s Tweets. He pegged activations/day at 700,000 on Dec. 20 (pretty near the end of Apple’s quarter):

There are now over 700,000 Android devices activated every day

— Andy Rubin (@Arubin) December 21, 2011

Results

Based on these stats, last quarter Apple activated between 613,979 to 692,551 iOS devices per day and Android activated 700,000/day.

This is a pretty big gap, but I made this chart to put things into perspective:

Click for full-size

*methodology: iPhone and iPad numbers provided in Apple quarterly reports. iPod numbers: 50% of total iPods sold from January 2010 – January 2012, Prior to that, the number of iPod Touches assumes that the iPod has 40% of the iOS market share via this GigaOm analysis. All Android numbers are based on Andy Rubin’s tweets.

Oh, and if you add up all iOS devices sold to date using the numbers, it comes out to 314,115,666. That’s a very large number.

This entry was posted on January 25, 2012 at 1:48 pm and is filed under Technology.