Learning Android™ Application Programming: A Hands-On Guide to Building Android Applications

Going International

The Android platform has seen significant year-on-year growth recently, but if you look at the growth figures you’ll see that only a small proportion of the growth has been in the United States. At the end of 2013, 1 billion Android devices have been activated, and that number is expected to reach 2 billion in a year or two. A large portion of this future growth will be in lower-end devices outside the United States.

Depending on whose statistics you read, 80 percent to 95 percent of the growth was outside the United States during 2012 and 2013. Much of the growth occurred in South America, Eastern Europe, and the Asia–Pacific region. The United States and China have the largest number of active mobile devices, and countries ...