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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.
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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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.