In Wednesday’s media event, Apple CEO Steve Jobs told the audience that his company was seeing 230,000 iOS device activations a day, a number that put it ahead of the competition (read: Google), and that some that competition (read: Google) was including upgrades when touring its own activation numbers. On Thursday, Google released a statement saying, in essence, “Nuh-uh.”
Responding to Fortune magazine’s request for clarification, a Google spokesperson said, “The Android activation numbers do not include upgrades and are, in fact, only a portion of the Android devices in the market since we only include devices that have Google services.”
Android devices that don’t include Google services are largely those devices being made with variants of the Android OS, which is open sourced, for overseas markets, and aren’t technically part of the Android platform.
In August, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said his company was seeing 200,000 activations per day, a figure that was still growing. Today, the company insists those numbers aren’t fudged, as Mr. Jobs said they were (though it could be argued he wasn’t necessarily talking about Google, but really, of course he was).
Still, Google’s Android OS activations currently lag behind iOS device activations, but then “iOS activations” include iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Android is predominately in smartphones, with other devices like digital media devices and tablets lagging far behind Apple’s iPod touch and iPad.