2011: the year of Google Android

More than 10bn apps have now been downloaded by Google’s smartphone users, writes Matt Warman , but Android is set to get even bigger

When Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google in 1998, the pair were already plotting big things: not for nothing was the logo designed with the help of a professor of design at Stanford.

Even Brin and Page, however, would probably not have bet that in 2011 nearly 8bn mobile apps would be downloaded for a mobile phone the like of which hadn’t even been thought of.

But 2011 has indeed been the year of the Android. Google’s free, open-source operating system has been so widely adopted by manufacturers the world over that it now accounts for the majority of smartphones sold and has been used for applications in appliances from fridges to televisions.

Top London tailor Spencer Hart is even using an Android-based “notebook”, the Samsung Galaxy Note, to annotate drawings for bespoke suits. Its uses are apparently endless.

The total number of applications downloaded now stands at slightly over 10bn. At an equivalent stage in its development cycle, Apple’s App Store was at just half that. As it’s compatible purely with Apple products, it could be argued that in fact the original App Store was more eagerly adopted, but the sheer volume of Android apps downloaded is a force to be reckoned with.

All the same, with 190 countries downloading apps – led by the South Koreans, Hong Kong and Taiwan and closely followed by America, Singapore, Northern Europe and Israel – sceptics would be right to ask why Apple’s remains the more profitable platform.

A quarter of all Android downloads are casual games, which are typically low-margin for software developers. Analysts believe Apple users download twice as many apps per device and that Apple has, thanks to the iTunes store, the payment details of 200m people. With the two app stores now growing at the same rate, those are the figures Google really needs to match.

Still, Google claims that while the first 1bn app installs from Android Market took nearly 20 months and the second billion took five months, the third billion took only two months. More than half a million new Android phones are now activated globally every day and the growth is continuing to accelerate.

The company has placed increasing emphasis on app sales and downloads, launching movie rentals and redesigning the Android Market to better rival Apple’s App Store. In due course,

it is very likely to start to offer the kind of performance that in particular makes the best iOS games so much better: that will be down to the puff of a vast customer base and better hardware.

To mark the 10bn downloads landmark, Google is also making a number of apps available for 10p for 10 days. Titles such as driving games Asphalt 6 HD, Sketchbook Mobile and keyboard improver Swiftkey X are intended as much to encourage users to download even more software and to show them what the platform is capable of as they are to mark the occasion.

It’s a peculiar situation, but in some ways Google’s marking this massive number not because it’s significant in itself – the real story, in fact, is how much bigger this Android is likely to get.