July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Verizon has just filed some federal paperwork claiming a whopping 9.8 million phone activations in the final three months of 2012.

The form in question, a sexy 8-K filed with the SEC yesterday, gives notice of announcements the company expects to make at CES this year.

Among other fascinating regulatory tidbits, we read, “Verizon expects 2.1 million retail postpaid net additions, total smartphone activations of 9.8 million with a higher mix of Apple smartphones, and stronger indirect channel performance in the fourth quarter of 2012.

“This will result in fourth quarter 2012 segment EBITDA service margin to be slightly lower than that of fourth quarter 2011.”

EBITDA stands for “earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization” and refers to a simple overview of a company’s profits. But Verizon’s slight dip in year-over-year earnings doesn’t quite match up to smartphone sales. In Q4 2011, Verizon launched six new 4G LTE smartphones and moved a total of 7.7 million smartphones in the quarter, 4.2 million of which were iPhones and 2.3 million of which were LTE-supporting smartphones.

For comparison, AT&T announced yesterday that in the same Q4 2012 period, it sold roughly 9.9 million smartphones, an estimated 7.2 million of which were iPhones.

For manufacturer-side comparison, Samsung claims around 64.8 million smartphones sold for the same time frame.

All in all, everyone’s Q4 numbers are a bit rosy due to unprecedented holiday sales figures for smartphones. In an all-time record, during Christmas week 2012 alone, more than 50 million iPhone and Android devices were activated (no Windows Phone numbers). And 17.4 million of these smartphones were turned on on Christmas Day alone.

Image credit: Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Christmas Day marked the most iOS and Android device activations than “any other day in history,” according to a report from mobile analytics company Flurry – with over 17 million new smartphones and tablets booting up for the first time.

Compared to the rest of December, new iOS and Android activations soared 332 percent on Christmas Day. Every other day in December only averaged around four million activated devices. It also squarely beat out last Christmas, which only hit 6.8 million devices activated.

Smartphones and tablets are undeniably mainstream and parents, friends, and significant others are seemingly happy to shell out for the technology everyone wants. It helps that a number of new products entered the market in the recent months, including Apple’s iPad Mini, iPhone 5, Kindle Fire HD, Nexus 4, and Nexus 10. The hype and marketing from these releases surely contributed to people’s holiday wish lists.

Interestingly, however, it seems like people think of tablets as a present, as opposed to an every day expense. Throughout December, 80 percent of activated iOS and Android devices were smartphones, whereas on Christmas Day, tablets rushed up and claimed 51 percent of activated devices.

Apps also saw an expected spike on what has now come to be known as Download Day. Compared with the rest of December, app downloads increased by 112 percent on Christmas Day with 328 million apps downloaded overall. Only 155 million apps were downloaded each day in December prior to Christmas.

Tablet present image via Shutterstock; Charts via Flurry’s report

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

It’s only been a few months since we learned Android hit 850,000 devices activated every day — but now that number has grown to 900,000 per day, Google’s Android head Andy Rubin tweeted yesterday.

With that announcement, it looks like Google is on track to hit 1 million daily Android activations by the end of this year, which we’ve been expecting for some time. The 900K figure falls in line with projections made by analyst Horace Dediu several months ago (see graph below), who said that Android could hit the 1 million mark by mid-August.

Now, more than ever, it’s clear that Android will continue to rule the mobile market in terms of overall volume — but that doesn’t mean all is well for Google’s mobile platform. Given just how well the iPhone continues to sell in the U.S., I figure many of Google’s Android activations come from cheap low-end Android devices in emerging markets. Google still has to prove Android tablets can truly take on the iPad, and it’s going to get even stiffer competition this year from Windows 8 tablets.

Rubin, a rather infrequent Twitter user with only 11 tweets so far, chimed in yesterday to deny rumors that he was leaving Google. He was responding to a post by tech personality Robert Scoble, who claimed he heard that Rubin was headed to a young startup called CloudCar. Rubin later explained on Google+ that he gives free office space to CloudCar in his Los Altos incubator (along with another company, Revel Touch), but he has no plans to join them.

Via The Verge; Photo via Lai Ryanne

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

New and bored smartphone owners alike went on a download spree last week, with a record-breaking 1.2 billion iOS and Android apps downloaded between Dec. 25th and 31st.

The staggering number of apps downloaded, courtesy of analytics firm Flurry, goes hand-in-hand with the report that 6.8 million iOS and Android devices were activated on Christmas Day. Naturally, many new owners of these smartphones downloaded all kinds of games and apps to make their smartphone experience more useful and entertaining, with 242 million apps downloaded on Christmas.

With those two reports together, the week from Dec 25th through the 31st set new records for number of smartphone activations and total number of apps downloaded. Flurry specifically estimates 20 million iOS and Android devices were activated. The company believes 1.2 billion apps were downloaded, which is a 60 percent increase from the first full week of December.

Most apps were downloaded in the United States, with 509 million downloads, or 42.3%. In second place was China with 99 million app downloads. Rounding out the top three was the United Kingdom with 81 million app downloads. Flurry appropriately notes that Christmas is widely celebrated in the U.S. and U.K., but not in China. But with the 1-billion-strong Chinese population hungrily buying smartphones, it appears they didn’t need a holiday to download a lot of apps.

Looking ahead to 2012, Flurry estimates that surpassing 1 billion app downloads per week will become a regular occurrence. The company rightly points out that iOS and Android adoption is “still by all measures relatively nascent” and with more phones sold around the world, many more apps will be consumed.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Android devices more than doubled their typical activation rate over the Christmas weekend, with 3.7 million devices activated, according to Google’s Andy Rubin.

The holiday bump, while not surprising, is yet another reminder of Android’s unstoppable growth. Last week, Rubin revealed that Android had reached a new milestone of 700,000 daily activations. At this rate, it seems certain that Android will hit the magical 1 million daily activation milestone at some point this year.

We reported yesterday that both Android and iOS saw record-high activations during Christmas, reaching a massive 6.8 million activations between the two platforms. While many of those activations derived from smartphones, the Apple’s iPad and Amazon’s Kindle Fire likely accounted for much of the tablet activations.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google CEO Larry Page said 550,000 devices running Google’s mobile operating system Android are activated daily during the company’s Q2 earnings call today.

The number of daily activations is steadily increasing. Just over two weeks ago, Senior Vice President of Android Andy Rubin revealed via Twitter that there were 500,000 Android devices activated each day. He also said that the rate of growth was increasing by 4.4 percent each week, which matches up with the device activation number stated in the earnings call.

If Google can maintain that growth rate, it will reach over a million daily Android device activations by October. Yet, with the growing number of Android-enabled tablets entering the market and lower costs to consumers on both smartphones and tablets, daily activations could increase much faster.

To give some perspective of how big the current activation numbers are, Google was activating about 200,000 Android devices per day in August 2010 — meaning daily Android device activations have more than doubled in less than a year.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Chalk another major milestone up for Google’s Android mobile OS. Google’s Andy Rubin tweeted last night that over 300,000 Android phones are activated daily — that’s up from 200,000 daily activations in August.

The news puts Android’s daily activations over both the iPhone and BlackBerry, and it even surpasses Nokia’s 260,000 daily Symbian activations (though research firm Canalys says those numbers may be closer to 325,000), Fortune reports. Android’s daily activations also point to Google nearing 10 million Android activations a month. In comparison, Apple recently reported that it shipped 14.1 million iPhones in its last quarter.

What’s most interesting to me is that Android’s growth is completely organic. Since August, there hasn’t been a major Android phone release that would have sparked an influx of new customers. That tells us that consumers are gravitating towards the platform instead of any one flagship phone. Of course, the fact that more low-cost Android phones (like LG’s Optimus) are hitting the market is also good news for sales. Low-cost Android phones, together with well-marketed high-end phones like Verizon’s Droid series, will surely continue to push Android’s activations higher into the next year.