Monumental Gmail news will not please its biggest email rivals one bit

It’s no secret that Gmail is one of the most popular email providers on the planet but new stats have just revealed the true scale of its epic user numbers. Google’s Play Store is now showing that the Gmail app for Android has been downloaded over 10 billion times which means it joins a pretty elite group of applications.

There are only a handful of apps, including Chrome, Google Maps and YouTube, that have hit that record-breaking figure – not even Facebook has managed that monumental feat just yet.

Whilst Gmail streaks ahead, its rivals have a lot of catching up do with Microsoft’s Outlook lagging behind with 500 million instals and Yahoo! getting downloaded just 100 million times on the Play Store.

Of course, Gmail and Google’s other suite of apps all come pre-installed on almost all Android devices which certainly gives them a headstart but it’s still an impressive milestone for the popular email provider.

Gmail first launched on April 1 2004 and over the years this service has gotten bigger, better and smarter.

New features include Smart Compose which helps users write emails faster with Google boasting that this upgrade has saved people from typing over 1 billion characters each week – that’s enough to fill the pages of 1,000 copies of “Lord of the Rings.”

There’s also the option to now schedule messages for a specific time and you can now take action without leaving your inbox. This means you can respond to a comment thread in Google Docs, browse hotel recommendations and more, directly within emails.

Finally, Google has been constantly updating its security and is now able to block the majority of spam which means less chance that users will be scammed by cyber crooks.

Speaking on Gmail’s 15th birthday Tom Holman Senior Product Manager, Gmail said: “Back in 2004, email looked a lot different than it does today. Inboxes were overtaken by spam, and there was no easy way to search your inbox or file messages away. Plus, you had to constantly delete emails to stay under the storage limit. We built Gmail to address these problems, and it’s grown into a product that 1.5 billion users rely on to get things done every day.”