Android OS Now Has 1.4 Billion 30-Day Active Users Worldwide

Sundar Pichai, the chief executive officer of Google, has announced last Tuesday (together with the unveiling of Google’s new Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P smartphones, Chromecast 2.0 and Chromecast Audio, and a new Android tablet called Pixel C) in the city of San Francisco in California that its mobile operating system, Android, now has 1.4 billion 30 day active users across the globe. 

Android usage has had a steady climb in the last few years. As a matter of fact in June of last year during Google’s developer event, the tech giant had revealed that its Android platform had reached over 1 billion monthly active users. And the year prior, it had already hit 900 million users, adding some 1.5 million new mobile devices on a monthly basis.

Reaching 1.4 billion monthly active users is quite an achievement for the Android OS. Intriguingly, analyst Gartner’s newest smartphone market estimations suggest that Android posted the slowest ever year over year growth rate during this year’s summer, asserting that Google’s operating system might have reached peak penetration, capturing 82 percent of the worldwide market for smartphones during the second quarter of 2015. 

But Pichai is quick to note that Android’s growth in emerging markets has been the key in continuing to boost the mobile operating system’s usage over the last few quarters. Pichai specifically mentioned the spike in Android usage in markets such as Vietnam and Indonesia, saying that Android adoption has increased two fold in those particular regions, which are interestingly markets that mainly consist of mobile users buying smartphones for the first time in their lives.

According to the United States Census Bureau, around 7.3 billion people currently populate the entire planet. Based on this estimate, Google’s Android mobile operating system has essentially been adopted by over 19 percent of the whole global population. And it is about to get even bigger -- Google has been making aggressive efforts to make Android smartphones more accessible to in emerging mobile markets through its Android One initiative. This project aims to collaborate with various phone makers in creating more inexpensive mobile devices so that more people around the world can be connected. As explained by Pichai, the Android One initiative has made significant strides lately, recently launching in Turkey in the previous month, with General Mobile’s Android One smartphone becoming the best selling mobile device in the country since then.