Intriguing Comment On The Way Google Counted Android Activations

As time went on, however, and the number of devices available increased, the counting did not account for old devices being activated under new/different users and this led to many discussions on how to handle this. To change the counting to the more complex device query of looking through the entire device database would cause a drop (at this time 18 month back) in activation numbers of between 30-40% resulting in a political nightmare.