Google loves to talk about how it has seven products with more than a billion users. Those are its flagship search service, Gmail, Chrome, Google Maps, YouTube, Android and the Google Play Store. Indeed, Android actually has more than 2 billion users now. Later this week, we will be able to add an eighth service to this list: Google Drive, the company’s online file storage service that launched back in 2012.
The company made the announcement at its Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco — though somehow it doesn’t want to commit to saying that Drive has already hit that billion user number, or when exactly it’ll do so. “Later this week,” is about as good as it gets right now, but if you want to buy some fireworks to celebrate, you probably still have a day or two to prepare.
It’s actually been a while since we last got any updated stats about Google Drive. At last year’s Google I/O conference in May, the company said that Drive now stored 2 trillion files and that it had over 800 million daily active users. At this year’s Google I/O, the company didn’t offer any updated numbers for Drive, likely because it was still waiting to cross the billion users number.
Over the course of the last year, Google launched a number of business-focused features for Drive, including Team Drives and Drive File Stream, as well as new machine learning-powered features for all users. The company also launched its new Drive-centric backup and sync tool for Mac and PC last summer.