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Happy Friday All!

We hope you enjoyed the short week. Vas and I just got back from New York where we were celebrating the opening of Accel’s NYC Office. It is amazing how much the NYC tech seen has progressed in a relatively short period of time. Anyways, we kick off this week’s mobile digest with an interesting piece highlighting that for the first time, the total number of Android app downloads will surpass app downloads on iOS. Pew Research comes out with some data that reveals over a quarter of American adults are using mobile and social location based services. Baidu continues to take on Google as they push into the mobile space with their Baidu Yi OS which will definitely butt heads with Android. Not surprisingly, Instagram is growing like crazy. The mobile photo social network surpassed 50 million photo uploads in August bringing the total to more than 200 million. Last but not least, Outblaze, a mobile game developer, is seeing ARPU’s that are 30 percent higher on Android than on iOS. They attribute most of that to customer acquisition methods and less competition on the platform. Have a good weekend and see you next week.

StartupDigest Mobile is curated by:
TJ Nahigian – Associate at Accel Partners - @tjnahigian
Vas Natarajan – Associate at Accel Partners - @natarjv 

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What You Need to Read This Week

Android is projected to hit 8.1 billion app downloads in 2011 compared to Apple’s projected 6 billion on iOS devices. That is up from 1.4 billion and 2.7 billion downloads on the respective platforms in 2010 according to research firm Ovum.

According to Pew Research, more than a quarter of American adults use mobile or social location based services of some kind. Only 5 percent of cell owners use their phones to check into locations using geosocial services like Foursquare or gowalla. Nine percent of internet users set up social sites like Facebook and Twitter to automatically include their location when using the service.

Currently Baidu is a desktop web browser / search engine that competes with Google Chrome in China. Baidu announced this week that it has plans to conquer the mobile front with Baidu Yi OS, a similar mobile OS to Google’s Android.

While I’m not sure if Mike Arrington is an investor, I don’t think these stats are fabricated, but they are certainly impressive. It took 10 months for Instagram to hit 200 million photos when it took Flickr almost 2 years to hit 100 million photos.

Outblaze, a Hong Kong-based mobile game developer that has reached 30 million installs across its titles, has seen ARPU’s that are 30 percent higher on Android than on iOS. While only 20 percent of its downloads are coming from Android, they are pushing hard to get that ratio closer to 50/50.