Device Distribution For A Universal iOS App | Hacker News Reader

Device Distribution For A Universal iOS App

stuartkhall.com

20 pointsappbot7 comments

Wow. Looking at that data, you can see that devices with mobile internet accounts for 77% of the total usage. Of these 77% only 10% comes from CDMA-based devices. I pictured the CDMA share would be much higher.

At this rate we'll be rid of CDMA in just a few years time and finally we can have one, world-wide, standardized GSM network with none of the carrier-shenanigans, due to the customer mobility that GSM brings.

When the time comes, that'll be awesome.

I'm surprised by the large skew towards CDMA vs GSM for iPhone 5 devices. Verizon winning converts from AT&T?

No, Verizon, AT&T and Sprint all broke out iPhone sales in their recent quarterly reports. Verizon + Sprint didn't outsell AT&T on total iPhones, so it would make no sense for them to be winning iPhone 5 converts fast enough to create this sort of version skew. Instead, I think we're seeing an artifact of how the models are reported.

If you look at Apple's iPhone 5 specification page ( http://support.apple.com/kb/SP655 ), you'll see that the CDMA iPhone 5 and the non-US GSM iPhone 5 have the same model number. That says to me that they are probably reported together in this sort of device breakdown (and may well even be almost the same phone under-the-covers modulo some configuration bits). In other words, the iPhone 5 on almost everyone but AT&T is massively outselling the iPhone 5 on AT&T, which seems much more reasonable.

There are two model numbers; you are confused by that breakdown as both models cover basic GSM: the difference is only in the LTE bands that each device supports.

On Apple's spec page I'm seeing "CDMA model A1429" and "GSM model A1429" (vs "GSM model A1428" for AT&T). I'll agree that the first two are different model names, but they look like the same model number ("A1429") to me. That's why I suspect the differences between the two devices are smaller than we might ordinarily expect (possibly including smaller identification differences).

Do the two A1429 models actually show up differently in this sort of breakdown (presumably with "GSM model A1429" as iPhone 5,3)?

You win this round (edit: maybe). I thought there were only two models:

1) A1429: Verizon. supports GSM (basic), CDMA (basic + LTE)

2) A1428: AT&T. supports GSM (basic), GSM (LTE)

However, there really are three. (edit: Or not. I've been asking around and there are mixed opinions. We generally care deeply, being those crazy jailbreak people, but we haven't gotten to that stage on the 5 yet.)

I can then say that there are only two device names: iPhone5,1 and iPhone5,2, so yeah: normal ways to differentiate them won't work, you'd have to do something special.

That's a lot of retina.

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