Google hits 850k Android daily activations

Twelve million tablets amidst 300 million phones.

Google's mobile lead Andy Rubin has revealed that Android phone and tablet activations are now up to 850,000 a day.

The accelerated rate of activations follows Rubin’s last update in December 2011 announcing that there were 700,000 Android device activations per day. That was up from 500,000 a day last June.

Rubin claimed Android's year-on-year growth rate was more than 250 percent, with the numbers being a "testament to the break-neck speed of innovation" in the Android ecosystem. 

Google’s Android partners had now activated 300 million devices. According to Rubin these included 12 million Android-based tablets, excluding Amazon’s Kindle Fire, The Verge reported from Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona. 

To put Android tablet sales in context, Apple sold 15 million iPads during the first quarter of 2012.

Rubin also noted that there were now over 450,000 applications on Android Market, still slightly behind Apple’s App Store, which last year reached over 500,000 apps.

When Apple celebrated reaching 425,000 iOS apps in July last year, it had 200 million iOS users, over 15 billion downloads in three years, and over 100,000 native iPad apps. 

The number of apps on Android Market has tripled since last MWC when Google announced 150,000 apps, however it failed to surpass the App Store last year, as predicted by one analytics firm.

There were now one billion app downloads per month, according to Rubin.