- Who
- Gmail
- What
- First
- Where
- United States
- When
- 06 May 2014
On 14 May 2014, Google announced that its Gmail application had become the first Android app to achieve 1 billion downloads from the Google Play app store – that’s almost one copy of the software downloaded for every seven human beings on the planet. Various collections of apps, such as Angry Birds, had already crossed the 1-billion mark, but this is the first time it had been reached by a single stand-alone application. Best estimates are that the milestone was reached on 6 May 2014.The announcement was made by Sundar Pichai, head of the Android operating system at Google. Gmail has been one of the packages installed by default onto Android devices since the operating system was introduced in 2009, and that has undoubtedly contributed hugely to this achievement.