Ten years after its launch, Android continues to set new and new records. At the Google I/O developer conference, the company announced that there are currently 2,5 billion devices in the world running this mobile operating system. This staggering number is a sign of how successful Google's approach has been in attracting users and partners to its open ecosystem.
"We're celebrating this milestone together," Android lead director Stephanie Cuthbertson said on stage during the event's opening. The number of active devices is growing rapidly. Google at the I/O conference in 2017 publicly announced that it had reached the 2 billion threshold.
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It's worth remembering, however, that these statistics are based on devices connecting to the Google Play Store. Therefore, it does not include versions of Android that do not have access to the Play Store. These are, for example, products running Amazon Fire OS, and most Chinese devices based on Android.
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These figures also once again remind of the scale of the problem of ecosystem fragmentation. As you know, only a small part of devices are running the latest versions of the OS, or not all of them receive timely security updates. Much depends on the manufacturer, operator, sales region and other factors. According to an October report, just under half of Android devices were running Oreo or Nougat, the two most recent versions of the OS on the eve of Pie's launch. Despite a lot of Google's efforts, the problem of fragmentation over the years has .