At the same time as unveiling the photo that gives the clue to the name of the next Android platform, it was revealed that Google now has over 1 Billion Android activations.

Rather than a blog post or an official announcement on the Android site, news of this milestone came in a both a Google+ post and a tweet from Sundar Pinchai:

News of the KitKat name spread rapidly, but from the developer's point of view the fact that Android asctivation have now surpassed one billion is actually more important.

Business Intelligence was one of the first to notice and produced this impressive chart of the day:

It shows that it has taken just short of 12 months for Android to go from 500 million users, a milestone that was announced on September 12, 2012.

Other evidence of Android's world domination is given in a recent study by International Data Corporation (IDC) which reports that Android now controls 79.3% of the world-wide smartphone market share, with iOS dropping to just 13.2%.

Another piece of good news is that Jelly Bean, the newest version of the platform is already on 45% of the Android devices, according to the latest Platform Versions statistics, updated the 7-day period ending September 4, 2013.

If you compare the table and graph with the one we discussed in July, when Jelly Bean overtook Gingerbread in popularity, you'll notice that Donut and Eclair are now missing. This is because they don't support the Google Play Store and are therefore not part of the user-base developers can market to. , As these historical devices account for less than 1% of Android users they are unlikely to be missed.

It will be interesting to see how quickly KitKat, as Android 4.4 will be called, can overtake Jelly Bean.

It really doesn't matter, however. As long as you have one billion target platforms for your apps the exact flavour is just a minor irritation.