Android had become the most popular operating system among smartphone users in the United States.

The vice president for engineering at Google, Andy Rubin, said in a Twitter message Tuesday that the company was now activating over 500,000 Android devices each day.  Andy leads the company’s Google Android platform.

In March, Nielsen, a market research firm, found that Android had become the most popular operating system among smartphone users in the United States, pulling ahead of the Apple iOS platform.

Although it is still a tight race between the two companies, Google’s strategy to team up with dozens of hardware manufacturers and get into inexpensive smartphones has helped it grow it an extremely rapid pace.

Last year, in an interview, Mr. Rubin predicted that Android would become the biggest-selling smartphone platform, describing its rise as “a numbers game.” Mr. Rubin explained that when so many partners were “building multiple products in multiple product categories, it’s just a matter of time” before sales of Android phones exceeded the sales of proprietary systems like Apple’s and Research in Motion’s.

Mr. Rubin said on Twitter that the company’s mobile platform continued to grow by 4.4 percent each week. The latest announcement shows a rise of 100,000 mobile activations each day since May, when the company said it was activating 400,000 Android devices each day.

Android is in more than 300 devices around the world. The company is also working with a number of hardware manufacturers to bring out new tablets, mobile phones and TV-connected gadgets in the coming year — and this will be sure to sustain the pace of Android activations.

The company also recently said that there were over 200,000 apps available in the Android marketplace.

Photo credit: BGR

Via New York Times