Google said on Tuesday that more than 10 billion applications have been downloaded from the Android Market, which offers free and paid programs for smartphones and tablet computers running the Internet giant’s operating system.
“This past weekend, thanks to Android users around the world, Android Market exceeded 10 billion app downloads — with a growth rate of 1 billion app downloads per month,” Eric Chu, director of the Android Developer Ecosystem, said in a blog post.
“We can’t wait to see where this accelerating growth takes us in 2012,” Chu said.
To celebrate achieving the 10-billion download mark, Google said Android developers would offer a selection of apps a day for the next 10 days for just US$0.10 each.
Google’s announcement comes exactly five months after Apple announced that more than 15 billion applications for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch have been downloaded from its App Store.
More than half of the smartphones sold worldwide in the third quarter of the year were powered by Android software, according to technology research firm Gartner.
A total of 60.5 million Android-powered smartphones were sold in the third quarter, giving the operating system a 52.5 percent market share, up from 25.3 percent in the same quarter a year ago, Gartner said.
Nokia sold 19.5 million smartphones using its Symbian operating system in the third quarter, but its share of the smartphone market fell to 16.9 percent from 36.3 percent a year ago.
Apple sold 17.3 million iPhones powered by iOS software during the quarter. Apple’s market share slipped to 15 percent from 16.6 percent a year ago.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day