Comment by kragen
15 days ago
As I showed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45413633, which I hadn't posted when you posted your comment, about 10–25% of mobile phone users have the Google Sheets app installed, because it has over a billion downloads. So it seems like your atypical personal experience is leading you into orders-of-magnitude errors.
I also use spreadsheets rarely, most recently three weeks ago, and often end up regretting it, but I do occasionally find them very valuable. I would find them even more valuable if I didn't know more powerful programming languages, which presumably is what you are alluding to with "write a real program".
I agree that cellphone screen input methods are clumsy. On the other hand, I've written probably ten thousand words of prose on this one, plus a fair bit of Python, Lua, and C, so a few spreadsheet formulas would hardly be an obstacle.
To be frank, Google Sheets came installed on my phone, don't think it's ever been opened though... Easy way to inflate numbers there.
That's the download count from the Google Play Store. I don't think it counts preinstalls. If it's preinstalled on many phones, the number of Google Sheets users could be much larger than my number suggests.