The Gmail app for Android has hit a new milestone by becoming the first app on the Google Play Store to cross 1 billion downloads. While technically the Google Play Services package has the most number of downloads, it is because the tool is preinstalled on every certified Android device running on Android 2.2 and above.
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While Google doesn’t mention when the app reached this milestone, AppBrain claims it was on May 6. What makes this milestone more substantial is the fact that the download counter on the Google Play Store shows the number of unique accounts and not only the number of downloads. This however doesn’t mean that all 1 billion are registered users, as many of them might also include abandoned or duplicate accounts. Having announced that it had 425 million monthly active users in 2012, that number could have reached somewhere close to 600 million by now. Also Read - Facebook Messenger becomes third non-Google app to garner five billion downloads on Play Store
Trailing the Gmail are other apps like Google Search, Google Maps, YouTube, Facebook and WhatsApp among others, which too have downloads in the range of five hundred million to one billion. Also Read - This Qualcomm chip bug affects around 30 percent of phones globally: Report
