There are now a number of Android apps that have hit the 1 Billion download mark, although most of them are Google apps. Facebook and WhatsApp are also in that club. The latest member of the club is Google Drive. By contrast, there are 1.4 billion users on Android right now. At least that was the number in September. Now these download numbers aren’t unique numbers. But numbers from every time the app is downloaded on a new device. So for instance, if you are on your third Android device and have used Drive on all three, then that counts as three installs. Not the best way to hit 1 billion, but that is still a heck of a lot of users to have.
Google Drive launched back in 2012, formerly Google Docs, and has grown to become one of the largest cloud storage solutions available today. Google offers everyone with a Google account, 15GB of storage. Technically that’s 5GB for Gmail, 5GB for Google Photos and 5GB for Drive, but it’s just one pool of storage. You can upgrade and get 100GB for just $1.99 per month and 1TB for just $9.99 per month. Making storage prices really cheap compared to their competitors. With Google Drive, you can back up your pictures, your computer, just about anything. Additionally, many apps have support for backup through Google Drive, like WhatsApp, which will back up your conversations into Drive. Very useful for when you switch devices.
Many other Google apps have already made the club of 1 billion downloads, with only Facebook and WhatsApp being the only non-Google apps to make the list. Who will be next to hit 1 billion downloads? It could be Twitter, or Instagram. As both of those have been around for quite a while, and are very popular. Once more, Instagram is owned by Facebook, who also owns WhatsApp. So it wouldn’t be too surprising to see Instagram make the list pretty soon. Google Drive is pre-installed on most Android devices, so it is a bit unfair that it has hit the 1 billion mark, and it would be interesting to see how many active users it has on Android.