700,000 phones are activated each day; there are as many as 250 million in total

Dec 22, 2011 21:11 GMT  ·  By

Android has always had its critics. There has been plenty to criticize as well, it's only with ICS that Android can be described as 'pretty,' there have been performance issues, phones that don't get updated to the latest Android version and so on.

But it's getting worse. With the patent wars now in full swing and Android losing most battles so far, it does seem like Android's future is in peril.

Add to this players like Amazon that take Android, butcher it and then create their own take on what a mobile or tablet operating system should look like and things don't look good for Google so, by extension, for Android either.

Yet, as gloomy scenarios and predictions abound, there is something that should be a strong indicator that Android is not going anywhere any time soon and that, even with everything against it, the platform will not only survive but thrive.

There may be as many as 250 million Android devices out there

It's the simple fact that there are so many Android devices out there. A couple of days ago, Android boss Andy Rubin said that 700,000 new devices were being activated each day.

Several million people are buying a new Android phone each week, most of them for the first time.

With a bit of guess work and a bit more science, using what data has been made available so far, Asymco.com calculated that as many as 250 million Android devices had been activated to date.

Granted, some of those may have broken down, been thrown away or are simply not used anymore. But most of them are.

Hundreds of millions of people now have an Android-powered phone, more than they have any other smartphone platform.

Even if Android is doomed by patents or cannibalistic competition, it will still take a few more years for this to happen. In that time, hundreds of millions more people will get an Android phone.

The platform will win by sheer size alone. The number of smartphones sold will increase exponentially in the next few years to the point where feature phones will become extinct. Windows Phone 7 is the only competitor and it's not that competitive

All those smartphones are going to need an operating system and there is no viable competition to Android. Sure, iOS is great, but Apple can only sell so many iPhones.

And every other phone maker needs an alternative. So far, Windows Phone 7 hasn't really managed to entice that many makers and certainly not that many buyers.

That may change, but if it hasn't happened so far, it's probably not going to happen tomorrow or even in a year. Microsoft has to come up with something truly exciting and it has to get a lot more developers on its side to have any chance of competing.

Beyond WP7, phone makers don't have many choices. They can create their own smartphone operating systems, some are already working on it, Samsung is even selling one, Bada.

But it seems unlikely that all major phone makers, or even just one phone maker, manage to come up with something that is better than Android, which built by one of the biggest software companies in the world by a huge team of engineers. Nokia spent years trying to and in the end gave up and chose WP7.

There are some wildcards, WebOS is going open source and something may spring out of that, but it's going to take time. And perhaps, all of the things conspiring against Android, patent lawsuits, disgruntled phone-makers and so on will really prove too much. But Android can take a lot of damage at this point and it's getting stronger by the day.