Android passes 2 billion monthly active devices

Google revealed a handful of milestones today during its I/O 2017 developer conference, but the biggest was undoubtedly that Android now powers 2 billion active devices. The milestone was passed in the past week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said onstage. “It’s a privilege to serve users on this scale,” he declared.

Let’s put that into context. That’s more than the 1.5 billion PCs that Microsoft estimates are running Windows worldwide. It’s also more than Facebook’s 1.94 billion monthly active users.

The last time Google reported on this figure was in September 2015, when Android had 1.4 billion active users. It should be noted that people could of course be using multiple devices and multiple accounts, so the number of users is likely lower than 2 billion. Nonetheless, the growth is impressive.

Android is the company’s first platform to reach the 2 billion mark. For a while now, Google has pointed out that it has seven products with more than a billion users: Android, Chrome, Google Play, Gmail, Maps, Search, and YouTube.

Pichai also shared that Google Drive is at 800 million monthly active users and Google Photos is at 500 million monthly active users. Clearly the company is hoping those products will cross the 1 billion mark next.