Google records 500 million Android devices activated

September 12 was a big day for the technology industry. Not only did Apple unveil theiPhone 5, iOS 6 and the new iPods, Google also reached the milestone of seeing 500 million Android devices activated globally. The search giant’s Hugo Barra, Android's director of product management, revealed in a Google+ post that Google had recorded half-a-billion Android devices activated until now. He also mentioned that the Jelly Bean statue was back to its place in the company’s compound after repairs. 

Google revealed at its Google I/O conference in June that it had reached 400 million activations, and that the rate of activations was 1 million per day at the time. Barely two weeks ago, CEO Eric Schmidt, while speaking at a press event in New York, had said that the number of activations on tablet devices stood at 70,000, while the total number of Android users was 480 million. He also revealed that the company had recorded 1.3 million Android devices activated per day.

The Jelly Bean statue's back

The percentage of Android devices running Jelly Bean has risen to 1.2 percent, up from 0.8 percent last month, as per official figures released by Google. The growth in the number of Jelly Bean devices is not much, but it’s not surprising considering the number of devices that are running the operating system right now.

In fact, even Ice Cream Sandwich is gaining ground at a slow pace, with ICS devices accounting for only 20 percent of all Androids, which in spite of a solid 5 percent growth from last month’s 15.9 percent, is not much. 

However, a staggering 57.2 percent of all Android devices are still running on Gingerbread. This is proof of the fact that OEMs are either slow at rolling out Ice Cream Sandwich to their customers or are facing compatibility issues with the older hardware. The percentage of Gingerbread users has, however, fallen from 60.6 percent last month. It is also revealed that 18.3 percent of all users are still using older versions of Android.

There are a massive number of devices employing phone-sized ‘Normal’ – 4-inch screens at mdpi (medium) hdpi (high) and xhdpi (extra high) resolutions. 51.9 percent of all Android devices employ Normal screens with high resolution, while 22.3 percent devices have Normal-sized screens with extra high resolution. Normal-sized screens with mdpi (medium) pixel density account for 11.4 percent of all Android devices. 

However, it seems the number of tablets running on Android is not as much as we’d like to think. The Google report reveals that devices with ‘xlarge’ screens account for only 4.7 percent of the pie.

The percentage of devices supporting a particular version of OpenGL ES is also given. It is revealed that 90.8 percent of all Android devices now support OpenGL ES versions 2.0 and 1.1. The rest support only OpenGL ES version 1.1.