One Billion Android Active Users As Google I/O 2014 Begins

Google I/O 2014 is kicking off, and Sundar Pichai is opening with some stats on the state of Android, which has now reached over one billion active users. The milestone, measured over the past thirty days ahead of I/O, also comes with new stats on Android tablet penetration, with Google saying that the OS is running on 62-percent of global tablet share, even before you take into account custom versions like on Amazon's Kindle Fire HDX.

In fact, Google has seen a 236-percent increase in tablet app installs year-on-year, as tablets gain traction.

Pichai also revealed some other statistics, about how Android users are actually using their phones. For instance, they send twenty billion SMS messages every day on average, and pull out their phones to check for new notifications and other uses, 100 billion times a day.

Android phone users take 93 million "selfies" every day – Pichai joked that his team had told him at least 30m of those were "duck face". There's also 1.5 trillion steps taken each day, using Google Now's integrated pedometer function.

There's more on Google I/O 2014 in our event hub.