Slashdot Mirror
Android Outsells iPhone In Last 6 Months
tomhudson writes "Despite all the hype about Apple's latest iPhone, Android has sold more in the last 6 months (27% of all smartphone sales) than Apple (23%). The gains for Android are coming at the expense of RIM (still #1 at 33%, down from 45% a year ago), Windows Mobile (11%, down from 20%) and the iPhone (down from 34% at it's peak 6 months ago). If the current trend continues, Android is expected to be #1 within the year."
Boy Genius and Engadget are circulating a report that says that Android has already overtaken Apple and RIM in the US. Android devices collectively represented a 34% share of the US market in the quarter, and with growth of 851% Android became the largest smart phone platform in the country.
Turns out Linux doesn't suck and it is good for something mainstream after all. I still haven't seen the real "year of the Linux desktop" but Android has already given us a year of the Linux phone, and we barely even realized it.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The numbers for the iPhone are of course going to reflect that the apple crowd has been holding off and waited for the new generation iPhone 4. The numbers for Q3 will be more interesting.
And then again, who cares, it's just a phone.
Tell your friends about xenu.net
...but hasn't the iPhone sales been slow the past 6 months due to anticipation for the new model coming out last month?
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
If this trend continues, Android will have 100% of the market in just over 8 years!
I love linear extrapolation.
Or rather, the exclusivity deal between AT&T and Apple.
Anecdote: I had lunch over the weekend with a friend who lives in a part of the country that AT&T doesn't cover at all. He and his wife had seen other peoples' iPhones while travelling outside of that area, and all things being equal, would have preferred to buy iPhones, but couldn't. (Yes, they could have bought one someplace else, sucking up a useless contract, jailbreaking, etc., but come on -- that's not a real option for most people.) They ended up getting Android phones instead.
AT&T's commercials assert that it covers 97% of Americans, but if you live in or spend much time in one of the areas (more than 3% of the map) it doesn't cover, the iPhone loses by default even if Apple's marketing is successful.
Yawn... These are sales from January to June - before the iPhone 4 was released. People were intentionally holding off purchases because they knew iPhone 4 was coming out. Wake me up if they outsell iPhones for the next 6 months.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
I am sorry, but this comparison is pretty crap.
RIM = 1 company
Apple = 1 company
Android = oodles of companies...
Its comparing apples to oranges here.
Of course you do see that Android is doing well. Something that I expected and it will continue. This is why I question RIM's, Microsoft's and Nokia's sanity of trying to go against either Apple or Android.
Though I wonder how long Android will do well. Here is the thing, people buy gadgets, but upgrade devices. With the iPhone 4 people upgraded. With RIM people upgraded. Nokia less so, and Android is an open question mark. I don't know either way and only time will tell.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Yeah, the iPhone wasn't even close to being the #1 Smartphone in the US. That honor goes to Blackberry. So why compare to Apple? Ah, because it's cool to hate on Apple.
Slightly different markets. People have Blackberries for business, mostly. iPhones and Android phones are more personal consumer use products.
If we're going to ignore the business/personal distinction, then I'm going to hate on Macs for doing terribly in the business server market. You just can't win! :)
My employer-provided phone is an HTC EVO 4G (Android). I could have chosen a Blackberry or an iPhone (or even Windows Mobile). And I work for a large Fortune-500 company. Corporate America is opening up to the new options.
(My company is large enough that they've outsourced the phone purchasing to some other company that specializes in it. I went to that company's web site, selected the phone that I wanted from the list that had been approved by our IT department, and they shipped it directly to me. All said, it seems like a very good system, especially compared to some of the other services that have been outsourced.)
Android 2.2 is supposed to take Exchange integration a step further, letting corporate IT wipe the phone if it's reported as lost or stolen, as well as allowing corporate security policies to be enforced. So expect Android to compete even more heavily with Blackberry once 2.2 comes out.
It's an excellent way to compare them. The strength of platforms like iPhoneOS, Android, WindowsCE, etc. is that you can run the same apps across all of the devices. The more devices there are out in the population, the more enticing it is for developers to develop for them. The more developers there are developing for a platform, the more decent quality apps there are, and the more decent quality apps there are the more people will want to buy into the platform. It's a cycle that accelerates at an increasing rate as the install base increases. It's what has made the Apple app store so successful up to this point and will work the same way for Android.
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
Are there any small Fortune-500 companies? What definition of "small" covers, "we have annual revenues in excess of $4 billion"?
It's a shame that AT&T held a gun to Jobs head to force Apple to sign an exclusive agreement with them.
And most important: multiple sources for applications.
You are welcome on my lawn.
AT&T's commercials assert that it covers 97% of Americans, but if you live in or spend much time in one of the areas (more than 3% of the map) it doesn't cover, the iPhone loses by default even if Apple's marketing is successful.
97% population does not cover 97% land area, it probably is closer to 60% or less land area.
Nonsense. Windows Mobile = oodles of companies and it still fails.
This space for rent.
Wrong.
I have a Motorola droid. I plug a USB adapter into the phone and my computer, swipe the status bar down, and tell it to mount the SD card. I then get a removable drive on my PC. I opened my music directory, selected all my songs, right-clicked and selected copy. I then opened my SD card, created a directory called "music", and copied my MP3's there. Never once did I have any need to root my phone for that one so I can certainly load my own music and I do not need iTunes or some other application to get anything through, it is just a standard USB drive. Ring tones required an app from the Android market, I picked one called "Ringdroid" IIRC. I then can open any MP3 I have and one of the menu choices is "set as ringtone", if I press that choice it .... sets it as my ring tone. I still haven't rooted my phone at all. I can also check or uncheck a security feature that allows me to install unsigned applications, that still doesn't require root. So as far as I can see everything the person you are responding to says they can do one can regardless of what you may have heard.
Some manufacturers do have some applications you can't remove - Android is Open Source and people are allowed to extend it in ways they see fit and that includes that. However Android itself doesn't. Some manufacturers have also chosen to require rooting for other common functions too - again it is Open Source so they can modify to their hearts content. There are people who want a phone with no "dangerous" options and are fairly locked down (as many iPhone users say they want to be) and Android can accomodate that - indeed Motorola's answer to signing ROM's on the Droid-X is "If you want an extensible phone, purchase a different model" for that very reason. Android itself is open and it isn't hard to find currently sold models that are near as "free" (as in speech) as the nexus one is.
Maybe last you heard was from another Apple user that wishes Androids were not selling like they were? Or at the least you believed someone that was *very* misinformed and you should take what they say from now on with a large grain of skepticism as they were easily fooled.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
So what is the right statistic for Android owners? The honest answer is that we don’t know. You’ll note in the excerpt above, we were careful to say “Google-branded Android phone owners”.
The numbers actually ended up being that 77% of iPhone owners intend to purchase another iPhone for their next phone, one third of ALL smartphone owners plan to buy iPhones for their next phones, 36% of Google-branded Android owners (e.g. Nexus One) plan to buy an iPhone for their next, and 32% of Google-branded Android owners plan to buy an Android for their next phone.