Following the announcement of its 7" Nexus tablet and the unveiling of the next iteration of the Android mobile operating system (OS) - called Jelly Bean (Android 4.1) - web search giant Google revealed some stats around Android and the Play Store at its Google I/O developer conference currently underway in San Francisco.

The company stated that over 400 million Android devices have now been activated (video posted below), which is up from 100 million mobile devices last June. Twelve new Android devices are activated every second, equating to more than one million per day.

Google Play Store breaches 600 000 apps count

Google also revealed that there is now more than 600 000 apps and games within its Play Store, which is just shy of Apple’s 650 000 within its App Store for iOS-running mobile devices. Users are downloading apps at the rate of 1.5 billion per month, to their Android-powered smartphones and tablets.

Over 20 billion apps have been downloaded from the Play Store (previously known as the Android Market) since its launch, which is still some ways away from the 30 billion total downloads Apple achieved via the App Store thus far.  

Chrome nearly doubles active user total

During the month of May, Google’s Chrome web browser managed to get the better of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) for an entire month, becoming the most used desktop browser globally during that month.

Google now has further cause for celebration, since its Chrome browser has almost doubled its number of active users from 160 million during last year’s I/O conference, to 310 million global users currently.

Even more impressive is that these users are downloading around 1 TB (terabyte, 1000 GB) worth of data from the net on a daily basis, with the search company claiming that it has saved these users approximately 13 years of time (waiting for downloads and search results), due to the snappiness of the browser rendering engine employed by Chrome.