Google reported that its mobile operating system, Android, now has 1.4 billion users. The statistics report was delivered by Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, during the Nexus unveiling event held on Sept. 30 in San Francisco.
The company explains that the number is comprised of users that are active on a daily basis, 30 days per month. The current figures rose by more than 40 percent since September 2013, when Google announced that the number of Android users have reached the 1 billion milestone. Moreover, 20 percent, roughly 300 million, of the 1.4 billion active users are running on Android Lollipop.
Mountain View has a history of announcing Android user figures every time the OS reaches a certain milestone. It did so in June 2013 when Android activations hit 900 million and kept a constant update as the OS activation numbers approached the 1 billion mark.
However, according to a report that was released in August 2015 by Gartner, an established information technology research and advisory firm, Android has had its growth stunted in 2015. The report also details that Android covers 82 percent of the smartphone market, which is the main reason why it had its slowest growth rate since 2013. There is now less room for expansion while iOS has a firm grip in 14.6 percent of the market while Windows has 2.5 percent.
Gartner also revealed that, for the first time, smartphone sales have declined in China.
"China is the biggest country for smartphone sales, representing 30 percent of total sales of smartphones in the second quarter of 2015. Its poor performance negatively affected the performance of the mobile phone market in the second quarter," said Anshul Gupta, research director at Gartner.
Google, however, is looking at another set of figures. Rather than capturing the remaining part of the market, the company aims to put mobile devices in the hands of another 1 billion users.
"We've added 400 million active devices and the momentum is happening around the world - especially in emerging economies. In many, many places. In countries like Indonesia and Vietnam Android has literally doubled in the last year. And what's exciting about this is in most of these cases these are people who are adopting a smartphone for the first time," said Pichai during the event. "We are well on the way to bringing the next billion users online."
Aside from Android figures, the Google chief executive also discussed the growth of Chromebook within United States institutions. Pichai noted that 30,000 Chromebooks are activated per day based on data collected throughout September 2015.
