Google has a holly, jolly Christmas as users activated 3.7 million new Android devices on Dec. 24 and 25, according to a high-ranking company executive.
It was a very
good Christmas for Google's Android mobile operating system, as 3.7 million
Android devices were activated over the holiday.
In a
Dec. 28 tweet, Andy Rubin, senior vice president
of mobile at Google, said, "There were 3.7M Android devices activated on 12/24
and 12/25."
Just over a
week earlier, Rubin took to Twitter on
Dec. 20 to say: "There are now over 700,000
Android devices activated every day."
That being the
case, the Android activation figures for the holiday more than doubled those of
a typical two-day period-amounting to 1.85 million activations per day over the
holiday.
This rate of
adoption underscores Oracle's claims in its lawsuit versus Google, in which the
database giant argues that Google's Android is rapidly picking up momentum in
the market with an allegedly incompatible version of Java at the expense of
Oracle's pure Java technology.
Oracle sued
Google for infringing its Java patents and is
seeking an early trial to stop what the company
says is Google's fragmentation of the Java ecosystem. Oracle also seeks to reap
a financial reward for what the company's attorneys say was a willful
infringement of the Oracle patents, which could mean triple damages for Google
if the judge should rule in favor of Oracle. However, if the trend indicated by
Rubin's tweet continues, Oracle will find it more difficult to overcome the
so-called fragmentation.
In a recent
court filing describing its plight in the case, Oracle said:
"Android's
growth in the mobile device market has been exponential, steadily diminishing
Java's share. For instance, Amazon's newly released Kindle Fire tablet is based
on Android, while prior versions of the Kindle were Java-based. Android has
been gaining in other areas as well, with Android-based set-top boxes and even
televisions appearing this year. These are markets where Java has traditionally
been strong but is now losing ground to Android. The longer Android is allowed
to continue fragmenting the Java ecosystem, the more serious the harm to Java
becomes, and the more difficult it is to try to unwind. Oracle suffers harm in
the form of lost licensing opportunities for its existing Java platform
products, and the enterprise-wide harm from fragmentation of Java, which reduces
the 'write once, run anywhere' capability that has historically provided Java
such great value."
Meanwhile,
Flurry Analytics, a big data analytics company that measures mobile application
trends, released its own analysis of Android and iOS activations over the
Christmas holiday. In a
Dec. 27 post, Peter Ferago, vice president of
engineering at Flurry Analytics, said, "On Christmas Day, activations jumped to
more than 6.8 million, a 353% increase over the baseline. Compared with
Christmas Day 2010, the previous single-day record, with 2.8 million device
activations, Christmas 2011 grew by more than 140%."
The holiday
season has been particularly good to Google this year, as the company's Google+
social networking service gained
more than 62 million members as of Dec. 27. In
fact, nearly one-fourth of those members joined in the month of December 2011,
according to one market tracker.
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