Google data suggests about 42m Android devices activated in December

Roughly 42m Android devices using Google's services were activated during

December, according to calculations by the Guardian using data which suggest that

there are now just less than 280m active "Google Android" devices.

The figures also suggest that about 1.7m Samsung Galaxy Nexus devices were sold in

the month, as they are the only devices presently available which run Android 4.0 , or

"Ice Cream Sandwich".

But Benedict Evans, an analyst with Enders Analysis, puts the figure for total devices

activated rather lower: "Google disclosed 200m activated devices in the second week

of November, and Andy Rubin tweeted that there was a run rate of 700,000 daily

activations on 21 December. A straight multiplication gets to 230m or so activated

devices today – not a very good number (at all!) but better than nothing," he notes in

a blogpost.

The Guardian has used higher figures to calculate the number of activated devices,

using data made available through Google's Market data about the proportion of

devices with various versions of Android that accessed the online marketplace in the

last two weeks of December. The figures exclude Amazon's Kindle Fire and the

Barnes & Noble Nook tablets, which do not access Google's Market.

The numbers imply that the number of activated devices grew by 17% in the month.

According to the figures, 0.6 % of devices accessing the Market were running Android

4.0. On a basis of 280m active "Google Android" devices, that works out to 1.7 m

Galaxy Nexus devices. Evans, using the lower figure of 230m, calculates that there are

1.3m, with an error range of plus or minus 300,000 : "At this scale, it matters that

Google is only giving the percentage to one decimal place."

When the Guardian calculated the number of devices that had been activated using

figures made public by Google in December, it suggested that to the beginning of

December there were around 238m Android devices active.

Based on those figures, and assuming that the number of devices running older

versions of Android such as 1.5 ("Cupcake") and 1.6 ("Donut") have not changed, it

is possible to calculate how the number of devices has increased. That gives a total

figure of about 280m devices now in use.

The data also suggest that there are now 9.2 m tablets running Android 3.0

"Honeycomb", compared with about 5.7m at the start of December – which would

indicate sales of 3.5 m Android tablets during the month.

Evans has used the same publicly available figures to calculate that there are 230m

active Android devices, and calculates that there are about 7m Honeycomb tablets in

use , and that 4.5 m 10in Honeycomb tablets were sold during the fourth quarter from

September to December.

The data for tablet sales will be disappointing for Google and tablet manufacturers,

which have seen Apple and latterly Amazon take huge shares of the market: the

Kindle Fire appears to have sold well, with some analysts putting sales in the millions.

For the Galaxy Nexus, which only went on sale at the start of November, the figures –

which suggest sales of more than 1m – will mark an encouraging start for Google' s

new device.

Rudz