you know most iphone fans do not understand android dev ecosystem..the reason why android is wining..
1. No OS license costs 2 plugged into java dev ecosystem which has large dev base 3 Mobile Operators love android OEM terms
1. No OS license costs 2 plugged into java dev ecosystem which has large dev base 3 Mobile Operators love android OEM terms
(1) it came close to parity with the iphone quickly.
(2) the flexible licensing model allowed Android to leverage supply perfectly and compete at every price point from $700+ superphones down to sub $100 budget phones and everything in between all the time with new releases every week on any carrier in the world. If you can only build X million iphones in quarter x and the smartphone market is 100 million phones that quarter you can only get X% at best. It looks like X was around 15-20%.
Now for the 80%+ of the market Apple couldn't even hope to address:
WebOS beat Android by a couple months at (1) but failed miserably at (2). By launching a CDMA phone on Sprint only you're fighting over a tiny slice of a tiny slice of the pie (low single digit percent of the entire world).
Microsoft took 18 months too long to deliver (1) but brings most of (2) (supposedly they are targeting high end only but Android currently out high ends them). Many have written them off I'm not one of them.
RIM had arguably the best brand pre-Aple but they are only now (and only on tablets) starting to deliver on (1) and were just as limited as Apple on (2).
Nokia had all the supply they could want but categorically failed at putting out an iOS/WebOS/Android/WP7 quality product.
So looking again at those hypothetical 100 million devices, 15%+ Apple, 15%+ RIM, Less then 10% total WebOS/WP7/old Windows Mobile/other and the other ~60% started with Nokia and month by month was slowly eaten by Android (prolly 40-20 Android by now)
The interesting question is will the person who bought a Galaxy Mini upgrade to a Galaxy SIII or an iPhone 5 in a couple of years time.
I think long term platform is irrelevant, for the most part your phone (and computer and tv and everything) will just decode an HD video stream from the cloud where datacenters crunch everything and send it at low pings over true 4G or mesh networks. ARM processors are already good enough to do this, the networks are "a few" years away. Google's got a huge lead over everyone at cloud but they're giving the OS away. Apple will make money because they will continue to make easy to use software (and poss good looking hardware).
However, those things don't seem to matter as much with stand-alone devices that are sold sans-contract, such as the tablet market. Nobody could outmarket and outsell the iPod when they went head to head. Didn't matter if the device was cheaper or better, iPod outsold them. If the tablet market dynamics are similar, Android won't fare as well on tablets as it does on phones.
Simply put, if the and Android tablet is the same price as an iPad, most consumers will buy the iPad. All Apple products are seen as expensive luxury goods. Nerds might disagree, but that's how people tend to view Apple.
If you could buy a BMW for the same price as a Chevy, you'd probably buy the BMW. Most people would.
Most people buy into Android phones because iPhone is only available on 2 carriers. If iPhone was available on all carriers, Android phone sales would be much, much less.
The iPhone is available on all carriers in my country (Australia) and Android is outselling it.
This is due to a number of factors, but two factors appear to be critical:
1) Lower Priced Android handsets undercut Apple at the low end.
2) The iPhone 4 is now regarded as an old handset at the high end. Sales of high-end Android handsets appear to be competitive with iPhone sales on their own, at the same price point (ie, even without the low-end advantage Android might be outselling the iPhone at the high end. This is difficult to judge, because of the mid-range Android phones, and price discounting on older high-end Android phones. For example, the Samsung Galaxy S (not S2) is now available at around half the price of an iPhone 4, but a year ago was directly comparable)
Sales figures in countries outside the USA where the iphone is on all networks shows that statement to be extremely unlikely to be true in the USA
OTOH all indications are that when in stock the iphone kills android head to head. The conventional wisdom was that this happened on AT&T because if you were with sprint or verizon and wanted an iphone you left and went to AT&T. This again was half true. However the other half was that when the iPhone came to Verizon it killed Android head to head again.
- non-techy Facebook friend of mine a couple days ago.
Android app store outright sucks. Many minor usability things on android are annoying. I don't think Android is 'winning' but I do think they are shipping a lot of handsets. IMO there is a distinction.
Chevy 'wins' over Bentley. Which would you rather drive?
Which would you rather buy? And this is important, with things like the $350 Vizio tablet. Bentley's are nice, but I wouldn't buy one.
And given this is a dev focused site -- do you want to make accessories that work in Chevys or Bentleys?
There may be more Android phones, but mobile web usage of iOS (or even just iPhone) dwarfs that of Android. Ditto with app purchasing/usage.
http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-US-daily-20110518-20110...
Globally it looks set to overtake in the next few weeks (it's a couple of percent above just iPhone, but 4.5% iPod Touch share keeps mobile iOS slightly ahead), though both are trailing Symbian by some distance on that global measure.
http://www.netmarketshare.com/2010/07/01/iOS-vs-Android-in-B...
UPDATE: Ahh, I see the problem. You linked to a OS market share graph, not a browsing market share. I didn't dispute there are more Android devices, I said the iOS devices are used to browse the web much more than the Android devices, even if they are fewer. Also, not including iPad share by StatCounter is silly. The iPad's browsing share is quite large.
I could put the difference down to just iPads, which apparently have much higher browsing rates than mobile devices, but the numbers don't agree there either e.g. my source has iOS as lower than Linux whereas your numbers has it as twice as high.
(Once you add iPad numbers you start to wonder why netbooks aren't included and then the fact that iOS and Android numbers total are dwarfed by any single version of IE begins to make it seem ridiculous.)
I don't get why fanboys of each platform wants the other to die... The worst thing that could happen is a smartphone platform monopoly... Hello stagnation... Hello nineties...
Depending on how you want to measure it, Chevy or Bentley, Android or iOS, both "win" for some definition of "win".
Depends on the accessories I want to sell.
According to a random internet article, iPhone accounts for less than 3% of phones shipped, but 40% of the profits.
iPhones make more dollars.
edit apparently Apple's mobile market share is up to 4% with more than 50% of the profits.
Haha, I used a similar metaphor and posted at almost the same time. Great minds think alike?
I want to use that. It's applicable to more than just phones and cars.