Google Play Services crosses 5 billion downloads on Play Store

Google Play Services has crossed a mammoth 5 billion downloads on the Google Play Store, making it the first ever app to do so. To put some perspective in place, the top 10 most populated countries have a population less than half of that.

However, this does not mean that the app has been downloaded 5 billion times manually. For those who are not familiar, when someone is logging into their Android device with their Google account, the pre-existing apps are marked as downloaded from Google Play. So what that means is that at some point over five billion devices were used that had Google Play Services installed on them.

During the recent Google I/O summit the company claimed that it had over two billion active Android users and this recent information lines up with the fact. However, it is unclear whether the search engine giant is only counting devices with Play services because countries like China do not have Google’s play services installed in Android phones or tablets.

This news comes after Google removed about  20 Android apps  from the Play Store after finding out that they contained a multi-stage spyware product for monitoring and extracting a user’s sensitive data like e-mail, text messages, location information, media files etc.