Ice Cream Sandwich

Google has disclosed Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) devices as a percentage of the install base today. The figure is 0.6%. 

What’s that in units? Google is very vague (to the point of obfuscation) about Android, but Google disclosed 200m activated devices in the second week of November, and Andy Rubin tweeted that there was a run rate of 700k daily activations on 21 December. A straight multiplication gets to 230m or so activated devices today - not a very good number (at all!) but better than nothing. 

Now, activated devices isn’t the same as devices active today (which is the number to apply the ISC % to) because some old ones will have been deactivated. But in reality Android has only really been on sale since early 2010 so very few devices are more than 2 years old, and we can ignore this today. In the course of 2012 I’ll have to start making an estimate of that. 

So, 0.6% multiplied by 230m = 1.3m or so. At this scale, it matters that Google is only giving the percentage to one decimal place - if it was actually 0.64%, for example, it would be closer to 1.5m. So, I’d say 1-1.5m. 

We have no way of knowing how this breaks down between upgraded and new devices (though Google presumably has that data). 

Next post: tablet stats.