It's been quiet recently, but assuming the trend provided by Andy Rubin via Twitter in June - when Android's 500,000 daily activations were predicted to rise by 4.4 percent per week - it's on course to reach the 1 million daily activations milestone by 20 October 20.
The 4.4 percent rule
From work carried out by Michael DeGusta of website The Understatement, between April 2010 and July 2011, Google periodically announced the number of daily activations of Android devices as a marker for success, as seen below.
DeGusta put all these figures together with the predictions into a chart, outlining the projected growth in daily activations according to the 4.4 percent rule (Projection 1).
However DeGusta is doubtful whether the 4.4 percent rule is as hard and fast as it sounds.
"Maintaining an ever accelerating growth curve as your base grows is challenging, even in a boom, and the history of Android itself had yet to truly demonstrate such a curve at the time of Rubin's tweet," he said
"It took 29 weeks for activations per day to go from 100,000 to 300,000 - an increase of 200,000. After that, the next increase of 200,000 took another 29 weeks.
"So from May 2010 till June 2011 there didn't seem to be a compounding growth curve, rather the number seemed to increase fairly linearly at roughly 7,000 per week."
Should Rubin have exaggerated somewhat with the 4.4 percent rule, DeGusta summarises that a growth of 22,000 weekly Android activations (4.4 percent of 500,000) would be believable, as highlighted by Projection 2 on the graph.
Silence is golden?
Despite it being 11 and a half weeks since Google's last earnings call, DeGusta believes it is too soon to dub the silence as suspicious, "despite some seemingly major milestones having passed quietly."
At the beginning of September 2011, Android coverage was predicted to overtake Apple in terms of annual app downloads by the end of the year, with 8.1 billion Android apps dwarfing the 6 billion predicted for Apple.
[source: The Understatement]
