Android Director of Product Development Hugo Barra announced the milestone on Google+ and confirmed previous reports indicating that Android is adding 1.3 million new users each day.

The figures are quite impressive, unprecedented even, but it has to be said that the vast majority of Android devices still run Gingerbread, while about 20 percent and 1 percent run ICS and Jelly Bean respectively. These figures on the other hand are not impressive, as they show that nearly 80 percent of all Android users are still missing out on the latest features.

So, although there are 500 million active Android devices out there, about 400 million of them still run on Gingerbread or, introduced almost two years ago, or even older versions of the OS.