• eWeek, Wednesday, December 7, 2011 12:14 PM

Since its debut in late 2008, Google says its Android Market just surpassed 10 billion app downloads. For context, Apple’s App Store is approaching 20 billion downloads, but the Android Market is gaining steam. Indeed, as eWeek points out, the Android Market tallied 6.5 billion downloads through July compared to 4.5 billion through last May.

“The Android app growth has accelerated considerably when one considers that it took Google from October 2008 to July 2010 to hit the 1 billion app download mark,” eWeek writes -- “clearly helped by the fact the more than 200 million Android devices have been activated all over the world, with 550,000 activated each day.”

ABI Research has the stats to back Google's numbers. “The researcher said the Android operating system vaulted over Apple's iOS platform in market share downloads by a count of 44 percent to 31 percent,” eWeek writes. ABI also said, however, that while Android took the lead in mobile app downloads, Apple's app downloads per user bested Android by a ratio of 2-to-1.

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