Android takes huge lead in US Smartphone market

http://www.pcworld.com/article/235105/android_pummels_apple_and_blackberry_in_smartphone_supremacy_race.html

by cshenoy • 15 years ago

60 73 15 years ago

pcworld.com

ryandvm• 15 years ago

So this is going to play out just like Windows vs Mac.

jamwt• 15 years ago

Yep--low margin but ubiquitous commodity provider vs. high margin but low market share premium offering.

kenjackson3• 15 years ago

One thing I don't get though is that Android phones aren't very low margin. Their retail price is just as high as an iPhone (or at least close). Even feature phones aren't cheap.

So do non-iPhone phones not get subsidized at full retail pricing (or generally much more substantially than the iPhone)?

zmmmmm2• 15 years ago

I'm not sure that's right. I think it's better to characterize it as high margin low market share premium offering vs everything (high, low, middle). Android's strength is exactly that it doesn't target anything and caters to every single demographic.

bonch3• 15 years ago

Not necessarily. iOS already surpasses Android in mobile OS market share, and Android isn't making any inroads into tablets and other mobile computing devices, which will probably be the bigger market than smartphones.

nextparadigms3• 15 years ago

It won't be a bigger market than smartphones, not even close. There are 5 billion phone subscriptions in the world right now. They will all be replaced by smartphones.

EDIT: Also iOS growth is slower than Android growth, still, so it's just a matter of time before even iOS numbers get beaten, with or without Android tablets.

mercurio3• 15 years ago

Except that Windows vs Mac was something like 95% to 5% in favor of Windows, while the smartphone market is likely to end up more like 60% to 30% in favor of Android. The situation is different qualitatively.

The data consistently shows that iPhone share is growing, just not as fast as Android.

cppsnob• 15 years ago

When a market is growing, it allows everyone to grow... for a while. Check out the Commodore 64 in this graph:

http://jeremyreimer.com/totalshare5.gif

tobylane• 15 years ago

It's easy to make a program for windows run ok on XP and brilliantly on 7 (I assume, never tried, that you do something like target net 3 or something else M$ have backported). It sounds like you can't be so successful with the old android phones, even if you tried.

gte910h7• 15 years ago

This is phone only share. Accounting for non-phone use, it's not even close, android is still behind.

iPodTouches are very popular replacements for gaming platforms for children/young adults (crowding out the nintendo DS), and there is the iPad, while blackberry/android tablets aren't doing well (Galaxy tab had a 16% return rate).

smackfu4• 15 years ago

I bet Apple prefers to sell $649 phones over $229 iPods.

dhjson• 15 years ago

Accounting for non-phone use, it's not even close, android is still behind.

That sounds reasonable, but do you have any sources?

bonch3• 15 years ago

Granted, it's a figure from Apple, but at WWDC, they touted iOS as having 44% mobile OS market compared to Android's 28%.

gte910h7• 15 years ago

Samsung lawsuit forced disclosure of iPodTouch sales http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/04/19/apples_samsung...

Even first day iPad sales blow through http://allthingsd.com/20100405/apple-300000-ipads-sold-on-fi...

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/03/02Apple-Launches-iPa...

etc.

mmorris• 15 years ago

The only market share numbers I've seen recently that included non-phone devices were straight from Apple (so feel free to take it with a grain of salt if you'd like). They have iOS at 44%, with Android at 28%.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2011/06/ios-number-one-mo...

nl5• 15 years ago

StatCounter has mobile browser usage (which includes all iOS devices)[1]:

Symbian: ~33% (it's big in Asia, and still has a large installed base)

iOS: ~20%

Android: ~18%

BB: ~12%

Note that this is only browser usage, which obviously doesn't correspond to total sales well. Symbian is still way ahead of anything else in that measure.

[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201006-20110...

Que• 15 years ago

This is just a side note, but how many non-tablet devices do you see sporting Android or BlackBerry OS?

Just saying in this case comparing only within the confines of the phone market share makes perfect sense.

gte910h7• 15 years ago

"Android Pummels Apple and Blackberry in Smartphone Supremacy Race" is a bit disingenuous when you look at periods when apple did not release a new phone (when most of their sales occur) nor compare the actual platform (iOS) which all three providers now have a tablet form of (Playbook, Honeycomb, iPad).

I find it histrionic and misleading. It's saying "Guy murdered in knife fight" to find out the one guy walked up and stabbed him during a short afternoon nap, and oh, he's not dead, just still in bed.

51Cards• 15 years ago

Not to be too obvious but that would be why the article has the word SmartPhone in its title as it's discussing phone share only, not general mobile device market.

Pewpewarrows• 15 years ago

As others already pointed out, this article is specifically about smartphone market share in the US.

But I'll be sure to mark down on my timeline of knee-jerk reactions that the debate is now about total OS install base across any category of device. I guess it's time to cross the "only on one carrier" argument off; I haven't heard that one in a few months.

bonch3• 15 years ago

Isn't it odd how the media always compares an entire operating system platform to one phone? When iPads and iPod touches are counted, iOS far surpasses Android. It's weird for them not to count mobile operating systems as a whole and instead focus on a single type of device they run on.

luigi• 15 years ago

Actually, no. As stated in the headline, this is a report on smartphone market share.

nextparadigms3• 15 years ago

It's about the smartphone platforms.

gte910h7• 15 years ago

That's the thing: It's only about phones. If you look at smartphone platforms you have to include the non-phone items.

ethank• 15 years ago

It's not weird. The media needs to sell media and will skew, manipulate or otherwise deliberately misinterpret any given data set to get the story they want.

In the end everyone is trying to jockey into position for an exclusive, invite, PR person to call them back, etc.

Media in general is a dance between control and access. PR people manipulate it to get good coverage, and the reporters feed it to get good exclusives.

Someone just got an invite to the next Google launch.

That is all.

*I should note, I played this game very, very well at a label.

nl5• 15 years ago

You keep stating this (in this thread), but it's not that simple.

Apple has sold 200m+ iOS devices in total (June 2011[1]). This includes around 60M iPod Touch's and 20M iPads[2]. There have been over 100m Android devices sold (May 2011[3]).

In the phone market, the typical contract is around 2 years, and the iPhone has been around a lot longer than Android. A larger number of the iOS devices sold are no longer in user than is the case for Android (simply because it has been in the market longer).

This can be seen by things like iOS vs Android usage statistics, where Android is about to pass iOS (note that this includes all iOS devices): http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201006-20110.... I'd be surprised if iOS stayed ahead of Android this year in usage, even including the iPhone 5 bump.

[1] http://www.appleguider.com/article/wwdc-2011-200m-ios-device...

[2] http://www.razorianfly.com/2011/04/19/apple-outs-q2-sales-fi...

[3] http://yourmobilesite.net/100-million-active-android-devices...

ZeroGravitas2• 15 years ago

The gs.statcounter.com stats for iOS only count "mobile" devices, i.e. it excludes iPads.

esun• 15 years ago

I lost my iPhone 3GS last Thursday, used a Blackberry Curve as a loaner until today, when my Samsung Galaxy S arrived.

I was really surprised how far behind RIM is. I knew it was bad; didn't know it was that bad.

canistr• 15 years ago

It's because you were using a Curve...

nestlequ1k• 15 years ago

Nah, I used a bold for a week (while I was developing an app for it), and it was unbelievably bad. I couldn't find a single thing to like about it, however the most unbelievable thing is you have to reboot the device every time you install an app.

tylerneylon• 15 years ago

By my calculation, there have been about 130 million Android devices sold to date, and over 200 million iOS devices (including iPads and iPod touches). I haven't found an easy way to get these numbers. Here are my sources:

* Apple announced the 200m number at WWDC this year http://www.tuaw.com/2011/06/06/apple-touts-impressive-ios-nu...

* There have been about 325m smartphones (including iPhones) sold worldwide so far http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1421013

* Android has about 40% market share worldwide http://gadgetbox.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/06/09/6820706-andr...

It looks like iOS still has at least 50% more users than Android.

But none of that matters compared to the one number I find hardest to determine:

How much money is sent to third-party developers on each platform?

Meaning, how much do customers spend on apps, less percentages sent to the app store owners? The consistent feedback I've gotten from all Android and iOS developers is that iOS customers are willing to pay more. (Apple announced they've given $2.5 billion to developers at WWDC. I can't find the corresponding Android number.)

Daniel14• 15 years ago

I imagine the number for Android lying significantly lower, because a) it's a lot harder to pay in the Android market and thus b) more apps are ad-supported. But I don't think you can ignore the market share trends in favor of how much money devs get on each platform today. Google is already working to get carrier billing for apps to more countries, so buying apps on android will get easier. Given the huge android userbase, it might soon be very smart to put in the extra effort of programming for Android (especially as you'd be one of the first to do so).

smackfu4• 15 years ago

SO that's about $20 per iPhone that people spend on apps.

GoldenMonkey• 15 years ago

A year ago, android app developers have been paid out $21M. Maybe you can extrapolate from that?

http://larvalabs.com/blog/android/android-market-payouts-tot...

guelo• 15 years ago

I've been keeping track of Comscore's numbers for a while and I've been looking for the Verizon bump that iPhones were supposed to receive. Looking at the derivative of the trends there does appear to be a small change but the effect is small and Android's growth is still about 3x the iPhone's.

Historical market share: http://i.imgur.com/Aj7og.png Change per month: http://i.imgur.com/2qIqH.png

One thing to consider is that these numbers are market share, they don't show how the overall pie is growing.

(By the way, Comscore wants you to pay for historical data so they wouldn't like this being posted publicly, but I've been collecting this data from their press releases.)

boredguy8• 15 years ago

First, thanks for the historical data. That's nice to see.

But it doesn't seem to me that we'd expect to see an immediate bump in iPhone's numbers from Verizon for at least three reasons unrelated to the platform's (potential) desirability:

1) The iPhone has a lot more competition among Verizon customers. For a while, if you wanted a good smartphone with AT&T, you were getting an iPhone. We wouldn't expect to see "auto-flocking" to the iPhone on Verizon like there was on AT&T for that reason.

2) Contract rollover inhibits fast reaction to new developments. I know a substantial number of people who went Android with the Motorola Droid release in November, 2009. For a 2 year contract, that means November, 2011 is when those customers will be reevaluating their smartphone brand.

3) For some people who wanted an iPhone, they probably bought an iPhone regardless of the network. iPhone on Verizon was (or will be) a chance for some people to change carriers and keep the phone they love.

I think those three factors inhibit a massive switch to iPhone simply because of its availability on a new carrier. Other factors may play a role, too. For instance, AT&T put a lot of their own advertising weight behind the iPhone. Verizon hasn't platformed the iPhone in the same way.

protomyth2• 15 years ago

I think the more interesting number will hit when the next generation iPhone shows up and, if history is a guide, Verizon gets an "entry level" iPhone. If Apple is able to produce a phone that Verizon can do the same deal AT&T is doing (free + 2 year contract), then we will get a real feel for what the trend will be.

Nokia might also finally get a boost in the US market thanks to Microsoft's help.

zmmmmm2• 15 years ago

Look I know there is this perennial argument that somehow it just can't be true that people actually want Android phones and there must be some external reason why not everybody is buying an iPhone. At some point you've just got to give it up : people buy Androids because they want them. They want them more than iPhones.

gte910h7• 15 years ago

Yeah, I just want the numbers of "I wanted that phone" or "That phone was cheaper".

protomyth2• 15 years ago

No, I know people who wanted the Android phones, and I expect a market for Android phones. I know quite a few people who still like Blackberry and have taken the "free" phone when AT&T was offering some BB models that way. I want to know the % of the audience that is in the "I don't care" category and would take an iPhone if it were the free phone. I expect that some people might have and older iPod and think of this as a cheap replacement.

(no clue on the down voting - seems like you cannot even imply free is a factor)

econgeeker2• 15 years ago

As a developer, what's relevant to me is the addressable platform.

Here the comparison is between a bunch of android phones with a mind boggling matrix of hardware and OS versions... to just one of the iOS devices.

Having ported an app between the iPhone/iPod and the iPad, and having done the transition to "retina" resolution, the fragmentation in the iOS universe is about as much as I'm willing to take.

Is there a single hardware & OS combination for android that is comparable to the size of the iPhone & iPod touch, iOS 4.x installed base?

I really don't know, and have no idea where I'd go to find out.

The thought of trying to support an android port of my apps, with the seemingly lower return on investment that the android application stores seems to give doesn't seem profitable.

koko7752• 15 years ago

Ha. You don't know how good you have it. On Android:

* Certain devices decode h.264 wrong and crash, others don't, and it's hard to reproduce and virtually impossible to test

* No, there is no Android device dominating the others. Not even close. Program to API 7 or API 8 if you must, but the whole thing's a headache.

* No expectations for resolution

* This freaking bug (ARGH!!!!!!): http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1353

* Everything is sized relatively, but the only way to size to a % of the screen (that I've found) is to pad a view with empty views with different weights, and set the middle view to 0dp (density-independent pixels, which, because of some manufacturers' lies and trickery, aren't always density-independent) tall, and have it resize later. But wait! Setting it to 0dp messes up other aspects of resizing!

* The order of operations that Android goes through to resolve layouts, if it's even logical, is incredibly opaque, and at the very least, not at all intuitive. For example, denoting a view "A" to be above another view, let's call it "B", is not the same as denoting view "B" to be below view "A". Now try that with four views, arranged in a T formation. Hellish! And good luck trying to resize an image to clamp its left, top, and right edges to the screen, and crop it at the bottom - it won't work unless you clamp only a corner (i.e. top and left) then have it resize to fill the third clamped dimension, that is unless you're using other special tactics to mess around with other parts of your layout, in which case you'll waste a LOT of time finding the right answer, or one good enough to use.

* The concept of resource overlays in Android is a huge, huge, huge pain in the ass. Possibly necessary given the complete fragmentation of the devices.

* Devices will actually lie to you about their screen dpi/resolution because they think it'll be better

* Some devices might have bad defaults, or not allow you to select a button without tapping it (i.e. with a directional pad) while others will.

* Weak-linking and adding in checks for future functionality is not possible, to my knowledge, on Android. Adding in support for Honeycomb features entails actually not supporting them directly, but proxying them through a compatibility library.

* The error-checking for XML layouts and themes is weak.

* XML layouts and creating views in the equivalent of a view controller is entirely different and the mapping is not 1:1. Combining the approaches piecemeal complicates the whole process enormously.

* Asynchronous data can only really be loaded one way without causing lower-end devices to crash on large datasets, and that is with the whole cursor/content provider ecosystem, which is a poor excuse of an abstraction given Java's power.

* Parsing stuff tends to be dog-slow unless you spend an inordinate amount of time paying attention to it.

* Certain upcoming platforms running Android - and developed by Google itself - don't even support the NDK, which means you can't even dip into C/C++ for performance anymore for said platform.

God, I miss developing on iOS. It's too bad our app got rejected for using In-App Subscriptions, then rejected for not using In-App Subscriptions.

econgeeker2• 15 years ago

I understand the frustration of getting a rejection from Apple, it probably wouldn't sting as much if they had better bedside manner. When it happened to me, I was livid for about 5 minutes, thinking it was actually due to a bug on their end. Then I investigated it and discovered that it was actually my mistake, and didn't feel so bad. But a little less terseness and I wouldn't have had that initial anger because I would have correctly understood the reason for the rejection.

I appreciate greatly the long list of issues you just presented. Despite the tone of my previous post, I was on the fence about android.

I'm dismayed to hear that google doesnt' seem to be supporting the NDK as much going forward, as one of the alternative solutions I'd considered was using the Unity engine. Unity is a game engine, but it can be used to make just about anything you want, and you could concievably do a regular, say, business app in it, with the advantage that the same app can be produced for multiple platforms, including iOS and android.

It seems to me, the way to support android would be to do a web app. Presumably the browser, being based on webkit, works and is reasonably targetable. But that limits android as a platform to situations where a web app works as a business model.

Thanks again!

codeslush• 15 years ago

I was an original droid owner. I didn't want to switch to AT&T, as I had dropped them years before for a variety of reasons. Everyone I knew got iPhones, and I stuck with Verizon and was happy with my droid. Two months (or so) before the iPhone was released on Verizon, my droid essentially died (left side of touch screen unusable which rendered the phone useless). I got a Droid2. At the same time, I got my non-techie fiance a DroidX.

Right after acquiring those two phones, Verizon announced iPhone. So...I returned them at the 30 day mark. Went to some old phones we had for a month or so and then got the Verizon version of iPhone a few days before everyone else.

I DO NOT like the iPhone. My fiance also DOES NOT like the iPhone. I will be giving mine to our teenager in a month when I have an upgrade available and she will be giving hers to another kid a few months later with the next upgrade. I will immediately go back to an android phone, and most likely a Droid. Why?

1. Unexpectedly - the droid battery life sucks. That was the major reason I wanted an iPhone. But, I'm willing to deal with it. In fact, when I actually USE my iPhone, its battery life isn't substantially better (but still better). But it's not enough for ME.

2. I am just old fashioned I guess - I like the physical keyboard. In its absence, I like swipe. For me, it's just faster to get my emails/sms messages sent. Forget the keyboard - it's a preference thing. I can get a device on android WITH a keyboard or WITHOUT a keyboard. I like the options!

3. Google Maps/Navigation is SPECTACULAR on Android. It's not even comparable on iPhone. I'm sure I could purchase an iPhone app to make my experience better...but I refuse! The android app is free, it's awesome and with the various layers it's just something that I can't live without. I'm very directionally challenged and that app is a lifesaver that I don't want to live without.

4. Little indicator light telling me I have something new. Stupid, right? That little light saves me from having to unlock the phone and see if I have something that's new or not. The notification system is just better.

5. Email - I can't (or I don't know how) to reply to an email on the iPhone and add an attachment.

6. I used my droid WAY more for voice search and voice navigation. I NEVER used voice in other areas of the device, such as txt messaging - but I LOVED it for certain things and I just don't do it on the iPhone. Why? Don't know! I bet it's there - somehow. For me, it's just not part of the experience.

7. File/Photo transfer - it was so easy with my droid. Plug it in to my PC - copy! DONE. I could even copy from my PC back to the phone and it figured it all out. With iPhone, it seems I have to do everything through iTunes. iTunes is slow as hell on my PC. I hardly EVER sync the phone via my PC for this reason.

8. I don't recall (and maybe I'm wrong???) ever having to delete voicemail on my droid to free up space.

I have more reasons I'm sure - these are off the top of my head. In the end, it doesn't really matter. If people are still replying to this thread, I'm sure some will give me an equal number of reasons why the iPhone is better - or even challenge some of the reasons why I loved my droid. At the end of the day, I'm going back to the android platform. I LIKED IT BETTER! I don't REALLY regret switching, because it allowed me to form my OWN opinion of the two platforms and come to my own decision.

This is relevant to this conversation because I would PAY the same, or more, for an android phone over an iPhone. That's MY preference, as a techie, and that's my fiances preference - and she is definitely NOT a techie. I have very close friends who just don't get where I'm coming from - that I must be crazy...to them - enjoy your iDevice. I'll soon be back to enjoying my android device!

gte910h7• 15 years ago

That physical keyboard thing is a huge deal with women with nails (nails don't trigger the iPhone screen).

While iOS catching up on the notification system, you're right about the defaults being somewhat better on some android phones for people (sync/maps especially).

If you don't like apps (sounds like you don't), it's a tossup which phone you'll like better. iOS has a better browser, sync is better on many (but not all) android phones, the lack of a physical keyboard is daunting for many, especially women with nails.

If you just take pictures with the default app, mail, text and use the default maps app, the higher quality camera in many droids can make it a better device for you. It's really only when you get into apps themselves (especially 3rd party apps) does the difference hit you. You and your fiance do not sound like app people.

That said, if you want to make your phones suck less till you get new ones:

Install PhotoSync to copy your pictures over. Don't even need to plug in.

Install navigon to make driving directions better

If you want new notifications now, either install a GM seed (not recommended) or jailbreak (a bit of a pain if you're getting rid of the phone), there are lots of different much better notification schemes on there.

Android takes huge lead in US Smartphone market

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