700,000 Daily Activations Isn’t Good News

A lot of the press have been trumpeting Andy Rubin’s tweet that as of a few days ago over 700,000 Android devices were being activated daily. One ridiculous report over at AllThingsD even floated the notion that we could see 2.5 million activations by the end of next year. But as far as I can tell, the 700,000 number isn’t good for Android. It’s bad. It means that Android activation growth has slowed dramatically, by almost a factor of three.

The last time Rubin talked about Android activations was back in June, when he said that 500,000 devices were being activated daily, and that they were seeing week-to-week activation growth of 4.4%. There’ve been about 25 weeks between the two tweets. Some quick math reveals that week-to-week growth since June hasn’t been anywhere close to the 4.4% Rubin was seeing. It’s now closer to 1.4%.

That’s a big drop. And I don’t know if the Kindle Fire is counted among Android devices activated. If so, the growth numbers for “real” Android devices – the ones Google can actually make money off of – are probably even worse.

And that report that we could see 2.5 million Android daily activations at a run rate of 900 million per year?

Gartner estimates that over 630 million smartphones will be sold in 2012. About half of those are predicted to be Android phones. I’m sure Android will make up the difference with tablets. After all, in six months the Messiah Tablet is going to be here.¹

The people at AllThingsD get paid for this stuff, right?