• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, September 12, 2012

On the eve of Apple’s latest iPhone launch, Google wanted everyone to know how well its Android mobile operating system is faring.

"Today is a big day for Android,” Hugo Bara, Android's director of product management, announced in a Tuesday blog post. “500 million devices activated globally, and over 1.3 million added every single day.”

“I see @arubin tweeting Android stats again,” MG Siegler tweets. “Must be an iPhone event tomorrow.”

Yes, the boast is “clearly meant to deflect attention from Apple’s iPhone 5 announcement,” VentureBeat concurs -- adding that, in fact, “those figures show significant progress.”

According to Mashable, the activation figure is “even more amazing when you take into account that in July 2012, Google’s Andy Rubin said 900,000 Android devices are activated every day, and in December 2011, that figure was 700,000.”

Considering Google’s land grab is a huge part of its Android strategy, this is a major milestone for the software giant,” BGR writes.  So much for all of those predictions over the years suggesting that Android’s reign wouldn’t last,” remarks Droid Life.

“Keep in mind this covers all Android devices: tablets, smartphones, and anything else people have hacked the operating system onto,” Business Insider notes. “For some context, there are approximately 514,000 iOS devices (iPhones, iPods, and iPads) sold per dayYet, regarding Google’s figures.”