At I/O '13, Google reported 900 million total Android device activations.
There's however a lingering question: are those devices being used as real smartphones, downloading apps from the Play Store, or are they being used just as feature phones, picked because they were the cheapest "modern" device on sale?
Google could settle this once and for all.
Included in the Google Play Dashboards are the "relative number of devices running a given version of the Android platform". The methodology states that "these charts are now built using data collected from each device when the user visits the Google Play Store".
Google just needs to disclose the total number of unique devices that visit the Play Store.
That would allow developers to know exactly the total potential market size, and could even help us decide to only target newer Android versions.
But how would this number compare with the 900 million activations?