Google today launched their annual developer conference – Google I/O – with a Keynote address at Moscone West in San Francisco. Sundar Pichai, Senior Vice President, Android, Chrome & Apps, wearing a Moto 360 took the stage and kicked off proceedings. He introduced I/O Extended viewing parties taking place in 85 countries, across 6 continents. He crossed live to London, Brazil, and Nigeria.
Sundar noted, referencing their recent announcement ‘Made with Code’, which encourages more women to enter coding, that female participation in Google I/O is up 8% over last year, with women now making up 20% of the audience. There were apparently 1000 women in the room, out of a total of 6000 – 5000 developers and 1000 journalists.
Sundar spoke about shipping phones, advising that 315 Million units shipped last quarter – with 1 billion phones shipped this year. This is up from 538m in 2013.
There’s a lot of data involved with Smartphones :
- 20B text messages each day
- 93M selfies are taken
- 1.5Trillion Steps per day
- 100 Billion times phones checked each day
- 1 Billion Active Android users in a 30-day period
Tablets are a growing market, with Android Tablets growing all the time since their launch back in 2012. In 2012, Android tablets made up a mere 39% of the market, this grew to 46% last year, to this year finally take the majority stake in the tablet market at 62% market share, however Sundar didn’t clarify if this included Kindle “Android” tablets or non-Google Play Services tablets.
Media consumption on Android devices is up. Way up. Youtube has gone from 28% viewing on tablets in 2013 to 42% in 2014. App installs are up by over 200% Year-over-Year, 236% to be precise, that’s a lot of installs.
Sundar finalised his opening by stating that having hit the 1 Billion mark, is to hit the next 5 Billion. A lofty goal, but Google has plans for that.
I really hope app devs take note of those numbers.
I am utterly sick and tired of seeing great sounding apps which turn out to be phone portrait only.