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Mobile OS domination, as we all know, is a numbers game. Admitted, back in what we like to call ‘the day’ Apple had it all – the fanbois, the cool, cutting edge product and, of course, activation numbers that seemed impossible to rival. Then came the rise of Android; innovating, expanding and increasing its handset offering constantly to conquer markets all across the world, hitting Apple right at its core.

Well, back in September we reported on Android activations hitting a staggering 500 million, with 1.3 million handsets being fired up every day, rocketing up from the figure of 300 million in February. Of course, this left us to ponder the big question: when, at this exponential rate of growth, would the open source OS of choice break one billion?

Well, minds immeasurably superior to ours (or more obsessed with those aforementioned numbers at least) over at international information company and market research firm IHS have also been mulling over the coming milestone and arrived at, amazingly, next year.

“The Androids are taking over the world of smartphones,” said Daniel Gleeson, IHS mobile analyst of the forecast report. “We expect the Android operating system to become the first to reach the milestone of one billion shipments during its lifetime.”

One man who doesn’t think the billion benchmark coming so soon is that amazing, however, is Google chairman, Eric Schmidt: “We just announced 1.3 million activations of Android phones per day globally – per day,” said Schmidt. “Do a little math(s) with me – if you’re at 1.3 [million activations per day], times 365 [days a year], and of course that number doubling every six months or something like this. This is well more than a billion devices globally perhaps within a year.”

See, a numbers game. And our next big one is the billion!