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Gartner Predicts Android Most Popular Mobile OS By 2014
mikesd81 writes "According to Gartner research firm, Google's Android smartphone operating system will in a single year have leapfrogged competitors like Apple's iPhone, Research in Motion's Blackberry and Microsoft Windows phones in global popularity, and will challenge Nokia to become the world's most popular mobile OS by 2014. Gartner says that the explosive growth of Android will give it 17.7% of world wide sales by the end of 2010. ... Analysts also say there are number of things that could derail Android's growth, including Oracle's lawsuit over Java patents."
...that the carriers are beginning to resort to their old tricks on the new Android phones? Stuff like replacing Google search with Bing and not letting you change it back, loading phones up with unremovable crapware, locking down tethering, banning installation of non-Marketplace apps, etc.
Before anyone replies, "Well, just root the phone to get around that stuff! Duh!" let me remind you that geeks who are willing and able to do so are far, far outnumbered by normal people who just want to use their goddamn phone, not tinker with it.
I interpret the evidence differently; Apple seems absolutely delighted with their 80% market share for MP3 players and 70% market share for downloadable music sales. I think they'd love to have a similar position in mobile platforms, although I agree that they will abandon markets that do not permit sufficient differentiation to support their target margins.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Android has something like a 1300% growth rate. If we extrapolate that forever, we can see that Android is going to take over the entire universe in approximately 15 years.
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I actually think that Android won't become super fragmented but will break into 3 main branches
Don't forget D. Third-party ROMs like Cyanogenmod and others. They have a pretty substantial following (they're the real reason people root their phones in many cases.)
... they never gave me any grief whatsoever for using my Android phone any way I wanted to. For the past year or so (since I first got a G1 and flashed it with Cyanogenmod) I've been tethering my laptop to it and running Skype, and doing other things that AT&T wouldn't allow, for example, an iPhone user to do. I pay my T-Mobile bill quite happily each month because they're giving me what I want from my carrier.
Ultimately, so long as there are carriers like T-Mobile that will let me go buy an unlocked phone (like the N1) and pop in my SIM card, fragmentation will be less of an issue.
The problem, for carriers, is that people want advanced network-based services like the so-called "Google Experience", they want the ability to run any application they choose. Carriers that refuse to acknowledge this are nothing but a business opportunity for those that do. Right now, that's why I'm on T-Mobile
The cell phone market has changed forever now that they're not phones anymore but pocket-sized personal computers. The cellular outfits are rapidly being relegated to their proper role as telecommunications providers: fat wireless pipes, no more. They don't like that, but unfortunately in world where the terminal equipment is smarter than desktop PCs were only a few years ago, they're going to have a harder and harder time justifying such things as "airtime" and 15c per text message. And that's good: I don't expect my home broadband provider to nickel-and-dime me for using specific Internet applications and services, and ideally would rather my wireless provider didn't do anything similar. Yet, that's exactly what they're currently doing.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
That's what I came here to post. I can't believe the editors continue to post crap from Gartner. They're excellent at making very bad predictions, or in this case absolutely meaningless ones. They have absolutely no idea what's going to happen to this market in four years.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Look, Nokia sells 4 out of every 10 smart phones. Outside North America (5% of the world population), Nokia phones are practically everywhere. It's worth noticing that while the Iphone is considered a nice phone (and even a game changer) everywhere and it sells quite well, it was a smash hit mostly in the US: In most places people already had fairly good smart phones, it just wasn't that big of a deal even if the touch UI was awesome.
As a comment on this Gartner guesswork: many people dismiss the work Nokia does in the developing countries but they probably shouldn't. China and India are already massive smart phone markets and they are going to be absolutely huge. Nokia is _very_ strong in these countries.
No mod points today - but I totally agree. Google has done something very clever which the other vendors have not - they have not tried to take Apple head on, but instead they've picked a bunch of different areas where the iPhone is weak and made Android strong in those areas. They are moving into heavily differentiating Android based on advanced features integrated with Google services (integrated voice recognition / control that is ubiquitous, for example). These are things that are *really*, *really* hard for competitors to reproduce. So you can't go into a store and look at an Android phone next to an iPhone and do a direct comparison - "this one has better graphics, this one has a nicer contacts list, this one has better facebook integration, ... " etc. You have to make a choice between a completely different paradigm. This means that despite the hype, Android is not really competing with iPhone directly, rather only in a secondary sense. Compare with WP7 where it seems that Microsoft is very much going down the line of out-Apple-ing Apple. There are some differentiators but mainly they seem like they plan to take on Apple where Apple is strong - super smooth UI, great gaming, controlled experience. I wish them luck but I strongly doubt anybody can out-Apple Apple. You don't fight an enemy on their home turf, you make them fight you where they are not comfortable.
It'll be an interesting 12 months, that's for sure.