Flurry: more Droid devices than iPhones sold in first 74 days on the market

Mobile app analytics company Flurry estimates that while Apple sold 1 million iPhone devices in its first 74 days of availability on the market, the Motorola Droid actually shipped more devices during that timespan. Sales of Google’s Nexus One, by comparison, kinda stunk: the company only sold an estimated 135k phones in 74 days.

Flurry reaches its conclusions through applications using its solution for analytics reporting. Because applications embedded with Flurry are said to have been downloaded to over 80% of all iPhone OS and Android devices, the company claims it can make reliable estimates about total handset sales.

Check out Flurry’s blog post for possible reasons why the Motorola Droid appears to have outsold the Apple iPhone in terms of numbers of devices shipped in the first 74 days on the market.

The respective launch dates of the 3 devices were: iPhone, June 29, 2007; Droid, November 5, 2009; and, Nexus One, January 5, 2010. Note that this means the Nexus One still has a few days left to reach 74 days, but it’s safe to say Google won’t be selling almost a million devices by the end of this week.

Earlier this year, Flurry estimated both first week and first month sales of Nexus One sales compared to Motorola Droid and the first-gen iPhone. They paled in comparison then, and they do now.

Here’s what Flurry has to say about the limited success of the Nexus One:

As Google and Apple continue to battle for the mobile marketplace, Google Nexus One may go down as a grand, failed experiment or one that ultimately helped Google learn something that will prove important in years to come. Apple’s more vertically integrated strategy vs. Google’s more open Android platform approach offer strengths and weaknesses that remind us of PC vs. Mac from the 1980’s.

A key difference this time around is that Apple is enjoying much more 3rd party developer support, whose innovative applications push the limits of what the hardware can do. Ultimately, however, developers support hardware with the largest installed base first. For Android to make progress faster, from a sales perspective, it needs more Droids and fewer Nexus Ones going forward.

Ouch.