Android Activations Trounce Apple's

In its battle with Google, Apple’s hearing echoes of the 1990s: Android activations are blowing iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch activations out of the water. Some 500,000 Android phones and tables get activated daily across the world, says Google’s boss for the platform—and that figure is climbing 4% every week. Meanwhile, the Apple devices were seeing 325,000 activations a day last quarter—a number that’s probably higher now, but not approaching Android’s count.

Market share is hugely important in the mobile platform world, writes Henry Blodget at Business Insider. That’s because developers are making apps for specific platforms, and those apps add value to the systems. “If Android grabs a dominant share of the market, as Microsoft's Windows did in the 1990s, Apple will get increasingly marginalized, and eventually iOS's value as a platform will plummet,” Blodget notes. But there’s hope for Apple if it stays “competitive on price,” and if Android remains “fragmented:” Its range of different versions makes development tougher. (More Apple stories.)