Hacker News Reader

Comment by YOSPOS | Hacker News Reader

These numbers are kind of useless when Apple is weeks away from refreshing their iPad line-up. You'll see Apple back in the lead in market share after that. Developers will continue to target iOS first because of that and because iOS users pay for apps.

View on HN

> You'll see Apple back in the lead in market share after that

So, at least we've come a long way from "There's not a tablet market, there's an iPad market".

I think one of the more useful measures of where we are at could be "the types of comments used by Apple fans to justify why Apple is still leading" metric.

The flood of lower end devices always made this a matter of when. What matters to developers is what to develop for first, and that will remain iOS for a myriad of reasons. Apple will be leading in this one measure once they release new iPads. In other important measures that developers consider, like how much iPads are used compared to the rest, it's not even close.

Notice that the post I was originally responding to was questioning why this information was useful. The answer is that some people rely on data in preference to speculative assumptions.

>These numbers are kind of useless when Apple is weeks away from refreshing their iPad line-up.

These numbers are the latest numbers. If you think they'll turn around then you can feel vindicated if they do, but for now the facts are the facts.

They're the latest numbers but still useless for any developer to make an assumption based on. Market share will obviously drop off going into the new refresh cycle. It's happened every time.

There is a difference between subject to change and "useless." The numbers are still quite valid to use to compare to the numbers present just prior to the previous Apple refresh cycle, which obviously tells us that Android has been gaining ground.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com