Google Play: 20 billion app downloads, 600,000 apps and games

In addition to announcing new software (Android 4.1 Jelly Bean) and hardware (Google Nexus 7 and Google Nexus Q) today, Google has also revealed more details about the state of its Android ecosystem, highlighting handset sales and app downloads.

Google revealed that 400 million Android handsets were sold until this year’s Google I/O event, an impressive growth since last year when the company announced 100 million Android device sales at Google I/O 2011. Also worth mentioning is the fact that daily Android device activations have reached the 1 million units / day mark, or 12 units every second, compared to 400,000 units / day last year.

Maybe the most impressive numbers are related to Google Play, Google’s digital content store. While the company is still trailing behind Apple when it comes to total number of apps, tablet-ready apps and total number of downloads, it certainly looks like Google is on the right track.

The company announced that it currently has over 600,000 apps and games in Google Play, almost as many as Apple, which has over 650,000 apps in the App Store. But Google did not reveal how many of those apps have been customized for tablet use – Apple has over 225,000 apps customized for the iPad. Moving forward, Android users have downloaded over 20 billion apps to date, or 1,5 billion apps per month, compared to Apple’s 30 billion app downloads.

Anyone impressed?