: More than 900 million Android activations served

BY GreenBot Staff

Published 15 May 2013

’s Android OS has more than 900 million users, the company said dnesday at its I/O event began in San Francisco.

also announced several As that will let developers add more capabilities to their Android apps, including in the areas of location improving battery life.

“It’s been an amazing year for Android developers,” said Android Chrome vice president Sundar chai.

has sent more money to developers through their ay Store sales in the last four months than it did in all of 2012 revenue per user is now 2.5 times higher than it was a year ago, the company said.

Showing a map of the world where Android penetration is less than 10 percent—which encompassed most of the world outside North America Europe—chai said ’s next focus is “bringing the next 4.5 billion online.”

To date, has seen more than 48 billion Android application installs, 2.5 billion in the last four months alone, said Hugo Barra, vice president product manager of Android.

announced an update to ay Services, a layer of software managed by on top of Android, which includes As for services like Maps Now.

ay Services is updated independently of Android, to give developers access to the latest As, helping to solve the Android fragmentation problem.

launched new location As as part of ay Services. The first, Fused cation ovider, includes a low-power location mode that should extend battery life by using less than 1 percent of battery per hour, Barra said.

The second, Geofencing, let’s developers define “virtual fences” around geographic areas that are triggered when a user enters leaves those areas. “This has been a big ask from you guys,” Barra told the developer audience, who cheered the news.

The last is Activity Recognition, which uses accelerometer data machine learning to figure out when the user is doing things like walking, driving or cycling.

has also advanced + Sign In, by adding “cross platform single sign-on. “ That means if a user signs on at a company’s website chooses to download their app, the app downloads automatically to the user’s Android device the user will be already logged in.

It also advanced Cloud Messaging, a hosted service that lets developers push messages from the cloud to their apps. GCM now supports persistent connections, so large numbers of messages can be pushed out to many devices, simultaneously.

It also added upstream messaging, so that app data can be sent from the app back to a developer’s servers just as easily.

stly, a new GCM A synchronizes notifications across different devices, so if a user dismisses a notification on their phone, for instance, it also disappears on their Android tablet.

The moves are all designed to let developers bring more capabilities to their apps reduce the friction involve in downloading installing apps.

The new As are available in a new version of ay Services that rolls out Tuesday.