700,000 Android Phones Activated Each Day, Andy Rubin Tweets [Android Leader Confirms Android Activations Reached a New Milestone, Doesn’t Say Anything About Actual Android-based Revenue for Google]

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Android is growing more and more and that fact can’t be denied as plenty of smartphone makers are busy shelling out more and more Android handsets of all shapes and sizes meant to attract certain demographics. And carriers make sure they sell as many Android smartphones as they can, from entry-level ones to high-end devices.

In fact, Android chief Andy Rubin tweeted that the number of daily Android activations has reached 700,000, an important milestone for the company. At this rate carriers would ship 255.5 million handsets in a year, but that number is probably going to climb up even higher.

The number is all the more important as many people said that Google’s Android activations have stalled since announcing in June that over 500,000 phones are activated each day. On the other hand this is the Christmas shopping season, so the numbers could be particularly high at this time of year. It will be interesting to see what happens in the coming months, and whether the number will fall.

But it looks like some people are missing an important point when it comes to the smartphone business: the object of the game is to make as much money as possible of your products while establishing a decent followship and claiming an important slice of the overall smartphone market. Google only has market share to show off with, as the profits from its mobile business are slim, especially when compared to its archenemy, Apple. And a significant slice of those profits come from ads shown on iOS devices, another slap in the face from the Cupertino-based company.

Since Android is an open source product, Android can’t license it to phone makers, therefore it can’t make any money off it, or at least not the kind of money Apple makes off its iOS ecosystem. And Apple’s mobile environment is bringing in a few billion dollars each quarter.

As for the Android Market, the number 2 application store in the world after Apple’s App Store, it’s not as interesting to developers as the App Store. A recent report showed that while Eric Schmidt is very confident in the future of Android, especially for the coming months when it comes to app development, developers are still making more money off the App Store, and would therefore consider creating iPhone and iPad apps before bringing them to the Android Market.

And it’s the Android fragmentation – a direct result of it being open source – that’s causing problems for developers, as there are plenty of Android versions in the world on a plethora of devices, that have to be taken into account when developing applications.

So how does it help Google to have 700,000 Android activations per day when in fact it hasn’t found a way to make lots of money of its mobile arm?

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