Despite what the numbers on the Google Play Store state, apparently Google has sold close to 1.8 million Pixels since it launched nearly eight months ago. That’s according to BayStreet Researchers, in a report today. Earlier this week, several publications noted that the Pixel Launcher had finally crossed a million downloads. Now keep in mind that the Pixel Launcher is exclusive to the Google Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones, so it gives people a good indicator on how many devices were sold, especially since Google won’t announce an official number. But it looks like the Play Store was wrong (or perhaps very late at updating?).
1.8 million sales wasn’t the only number that BayStreet Research had. It also stated that around 475,000 Google Pixel devices were sold in the second quarter of the year (which ends on June 30th, so there’s still time for it to grow even larger). Of course these numbers are not confirmed by Google, the search engine almost never announces the number of products sold (and they never did with the Nexus lineup). So this is all based on insiders knowledge of sales and such. But it does appear to have outside all of the Nexus devices that came before it.
Google’s Nexus smartphones never sold that well, when compared to the likes of the Apple iPhone or the Samsung Galaxy S lines of smartphones. While Google never announced sales numbers, it was said to be under a million for each device. Although the Nexus 6P was the most successful of the entire lineup. Now 1.8 million still isn’t a dent into Apple or Samsung’s market share, but for Google, that is actually a pretty big number. And one that will likely grow later this year as the current generation of smartphones start to get discounted, and Google prepares to launch the Pixel and Pixel XL second generation this fall. The Google Pixel and Pixel XL were only sold unlocked, and exclusive in Verizon stores. It’s said that the big reason why the Pixels did better than the Nexus was the fact that it had Verizon’s marketing power behind it. Even being at just one carrier, having that huge marketing push obviously helped Google out.