Android activations reach 10 devices per second, according to Andy Rubin

Andy Rubin’s on Twitter again and while his latest tweet squashes rumours about him leaving Google, he didn’t miss the opportunity to brag about Android’s latest activation numbers that have now reached over 9,00,000 devices each day or roughly translated, 10 devices a second. Android is clearly growing at a very rapid pace and a part of that reason the availability of the OS at different price segments, which make it a lot more affordable for the average consumer. The huge array of apps also play a big role in the adoption of Android, as compared to that of, say Symbian or Bada.

And counting…

Back in December 2010, Andy Rubin tweeted that there were around 3,00,000 devices activated, which soon grew to about 5,00,000 devices per day, on 28 June, 2011. While it’s great that Android is growing at such a rapid pace, it’s a bit sad that Ice Cream Sandwich adoption is still a bit poor and is nowhere close to what Gingerbread was at this time, a year back. Google’s ICS is a big improvement over their previous Gingerbread OS, but yet, many Android users are yet to experience it, either because OEM’s haven’t bothered rolling out the update or the fact that the phones aren’t compatible with it.

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The delay most likely lies with the OEMs, since they have to skin the new OS, test it out to make sure nothing is broken and then release it. This ideally shouldn’t take too long, but most manufacturers have a fleet of different versions of the same phone that’s being sold in different countries and for different carriers, which is where the bottleneck comes in. It’s not like the iPhone, which is just one phone and one version that’s being sold globally. Gingerbread launched in December 2010 and more than 50 percent of all Android phones were already running 2.3.3 by December 2011.

Google is all set to roll out Jelly Bean come June-end at the Google I/O conference that will bump up the version number to 4.1. It’s still unclear, which phone will be getting that update given how most of them haven’t even received ICS yet.