The amount of Google Cardboard app downloads has doubled in just the past four months.
Today, onstage at I/O, Google’s head of VR, Clay Bavor, announced that the company had seen downloads on the Google Cardboard platform from the Google Play store grow to 50 million from just 25 million downloads in January.
“We think that’s pretty good for what is, after all, just a piece of cardboard,” Bavor said onstage.
Google last reported that over 5 million Cardboard headsets were in consumer hands. Bavor didn’t offer any updated metrics on the sheer amount of actual headsets out there today, other than reiterating there were “millions and millions” of them out in the wild.
Other mobile VR makers have a long way to go to catch up with Google’s effortless VR platform. Samsung announced last week that the company had over 1 million users on their Gear VR platform last month, but also specified that there were only 250 apps on the Oculus store for the headset.
Google announced a host of things related to its virtual reality aspirations today, including a low-latency Daydream VR mode in Android N and a new reference design for future Google Cardboard hardware.