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Android Passes iPhone In US Market Share
Adrian writes "61.5 million people in the US owned smartphones during the three months ending in November 2010, up 10 percent from the preceding three-month period. For the first time, more Americans are using phones running Google's Android operating system than Apple's iPhone, but RIM's BlackBerry is still in first place, according to comScore. RIM fell from 37.6 percent to 33.5 percent market share of smartphones, Google captured second place among smartphone platforms by moving from 19.6 percent to 26.0 percent of US smartphone subscribers, and Apple slipped to third despite its growth from 24.2 percent to 25.0 percent of the market. Microsoft, in fourth place, fell into single digits from 10.8 percent to 9.0 percent while Palm was still last and further slipped from 4.6 percent to 3.9 percent."
This is not unexpected, since Android sales have been outpacing iPhone sales for some time, but it happened significantly earlier than Gartner's prediction: Q4 2012.
It is telling to note, that both Android and iPhone are growing market share at the expense of Blackberry and others, rather than at the expense of each other.
The more competition the better, I say.
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/apple-leads-smartphone-race-while-android-attracts-most-recent-customers/
Obviously, someone is wrong on the Internet!
android already surpassed iphone in global market share. This happened quite a while ago. Look up smartphone on wikipedia
I, too, bought an Android phone in November (Motorola Defy). I like it, it's going to work out fine for me. But I have to admit, compared to the iPhone and BlackBerry both, my phone's OS is buggy and clunky, the stock Android stuff is lacking features, and the attempts by the handset maker (Motorola) to make up for its deficiencies don't mesh well with the core OS. Unexplained things happen every so often, which don't really phase me as a seasoned computer user, but would drive my mom bats.
The manual actually tells you to reboot the phone every so often. I don't disagree with this -- seems like sound advice for a device of this complexity -- but by comparison, my BlackBerry would actually reboot itself automatically every night if I wanted it to. And it turns out that if you don't reboot this phone, after a while it might do stuff like, oh, silently stop receiving your email. Reboot and ten messages show up. As a former BlackBerry user, that is not good. That is bad. And that's just one example -- it seems like random things will start to happen, which might frustrate you if you didn't feel OK with just rebooting the phone. (Though to be fair, any reluctance I have to reboot comes from me being a BlackBerry user, where rebooting is the last thing on Earth you want to do.)
I switched from BlackBerry because I felt like my BlackBerry Pearl was getting long in the tooth, and none of the new models appealed to me. Plus, change is good every now and then. I didn't pick iPhone for various reasons, mostly relating to not wanting to do business with either Apple or AT&T (and certainly not Verizon, when that happens). But I gotta admit, iPhone is the better phone. So what is making all these other people choose Android phones instead of iPhones, assuming they don't share my unique background and prejudices? It's not price -- as far as I can tell, that's pretty comparable for both platforms these days.
Breakfast served all day!
How so? As far as I understand it, Google isn't make much if anything at all on Android. Also, Apple has never cared so much about market share as they do about margins.
In Capitalist rest of world you research cheapest sim to swap.
In Soviet America telcos swap you.
The USA can still ride the lock in profit on rust belt networks.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
On second thought, they are making some money according to this URL. But 1bn a year is nothing compared to what Apple is making from iOS.
http://allaboutserver.net/google-android-revenue-now-running-at-1bn-per-year/
So Motorola, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, HTC, LG, Meizu, and more have created well over 20 handsets on four networks which all together sell more in America than two models of 1 handset from Apple only on AT&T. These guys should be patting themselves on the back for a job well done.
Even more impressive than you consider that (atleast earlier, maybe we're too far into the year now, but it doesn't matter much for the comparision) Android only had a 3.5% market share just a year ago (eventually more, as said, so what if it was 13-14 months ago? ..)
People draw very weird conclusions for that though. Earlier I guess the conclusion was that Android would never get a foot in, and that iPhone was small but much bigger than Android. Now iPhone is pretty big and Android have had amazing growth. So now the conclusion is that everyone want only iPhones or that Android will beat all other mobile OSes.
And when Playstation bet Nintendo and killed of Sega (Sega killed themselves .. :D) and the Gamecube sold even worse people wheren't slow to conclude that Nintendo was dying and would never come back on top. And who thought Xbox would get in? Seriously? Before the mod chips?
People seem to only be able to look at the current trend and extrapolate it into the future assuming everything will be the same and nothing will change in the future and current trends can survive forever. Well guess what? ...
Atleast it's nice to see that totally new concepts and player can actually become a major player on the market and that everything isn't stuck in same old. As it more or less is and has ever been on the PC market.
Mod up, folks. Apple is very happy to ignore the bottom of the market and focus solely on people who have enough money to afford a premium product. Why? Because if you can afford their products, you're not going to balk at spending $50-$100 more for one that looks great and has a fantastic UI.
Again, its not about the hardware or even the OS, its the cut of the APP sales...Google is destined to make waaaay more money on the deal by virtue of simply having more people running Android and thus buying apps from the Android Marketplace.
Google GIVES away android so that they can have handset marketshare, and thus a MUCH bigger cut of APP money than Apple will ever have.
They're getting the iPhone because the iPhone causes them to lose customers to AT&T, not because Android sales are bad.
Is there actual numbers on this? I though the norm on the marketplace was to sell everything for free but with ads. And now Google has competition from Amazon's app store, which is probably going to have a much more favorable business proposition for devs than Google's, since Amazon can accept payments from most anywhere on Earth, has better tie-ins with their store, etc.
A phone OS that pays for itself by pushing ads to you will always be a very special sort of hell. At least when Windows was beating Apple, Windows didn't sell you flower delivery and movie trailers in the process.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Seriously, I've come to the conclusion that all of these cellphone/smartphone marketshare/sales statistics are full of crap. Why do I say that? It seems like every single one of them shows a different contender in the lead, and usually whichever contender the presenter of said statistics is favoring at the moment. There are probably a hundred different ways these statistics can be compiled, and each one takes a slightly different approach. Sometimes they're comparing a particular quarter, alighted to a particular fiscal calendar. Sometimes they're limited the class of devices. Sometimes its US-only, and sometimes its Global. Whichever platform you like best, you'll find someone showing a survey/pie-chart/analysis showing how they're ahead of the competition.
Regardless, here's how I see the three mentioned players handling their game:
The conversation is about the market penetration of cellular phone OS's, not about the market penetration of the physical phones themselves. Really, if apple wanted to brag a higher market penetration, they would provide users with more options, like devices made by other manufacturers, or more affordable phones.
Once iPhone comes to Verizon (likely the announcement is Tuesday and release February), the iPhone will again rise to the top.
But remember Steve said "web apps only" when the iPhone launched. You're getting things out of order. The apps and App Store happened some time after the iPhone launched.'
With JUST AT&T as a carrier.
When Verizon gets the iPhone, I say that the market share proposition shifts big towards iPhone.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Because they are a business, not a charity.
Two issues with that line of thinking: One, it isn't clear that there is all that much gold in "getting the software on as many units as possible"(at least if you have to compromise as much as Google has to do so. We'll see whether MS ever makes any money on their more or less traditionally OEM licenced 'Windows Phone 7' product; but Google is basically giving it away, so much that they won't even have the 'give away razors, sell blades' strategy. There are already 3-4 competing app stores, and carriers can do whatever the fuck they want in terms of munging their builds. Only through branding arrangements or superior engineering can Google even keep the majority of 'Android' devices as 'Google Android' devices...)
Second, it isn't clear that Apple would be capable of creating the products that they do if they had to play nice with third parties that have their own agendas. Basically every part of the iPhone that AT&T has had a hand in(no tethering, using app store control to keep especially bandwidth heavy or voice-minutes threatening stuff nonexistent or wifi only, etc.) has been seen as among the suckiest aspects of the device. Similarly, they achieve spec and UI consistency(to the degree that they do, Apple has frankly gone soft about being the 'UI leader' after decades of competition with Microsoft...) by means of crushing third-party 'skins' and 'value added software' and carrier preloads and so forth. They also control all updates, and push them pretty aggressively. Were they deprived of these advantages, it isn't clear that a company of Apple's(relatively small) size could possibly manage what they presently do.
My personal suspicion RE: Android vs. Apple is as follows:
When Apple first released the iPhone, their stance was "Our applications only, everyone else can do webapps or go home crying, what're you gonna do about it, switch to Windows Mobile?" With this as Apple's stance, it was easy for Google and Apple to be bestest-ever buddies: Apple got premium integration of desireable Google properties(native youtube, native Maps), and Google got the first smash-hit internet-enabled phone that had virtually zero carrier control pushing people toward WAP-crap carrier stores or anything else that would keep mobile users away from the open internet, where Google scored its sweet, sweet adwords money.
At that point, Android was a relatively low-priority project, basically aimed at using the ex-Danger guys to build a phone OS with a good web browser, minimally acceptable other features, and good integration with google stuff(maps, gmail, bookmarks, etc.) Google had no real reason to try to go head to head with Apple, who had a markedly superior product(that relied heavily on Google services and drove well-heeled mobile users right onto the open internet where Google knew how to make money...); but they had a strong interest in giving the vast 'featurephone' and 'dumbphone' market that Apple would never deign to touch a major kick in the ass. As long as most wireless users had a worse-than-useless browser that was largely designed to dump them right in the carrier's walled garden 'o suck, they would be useless to Google. And thus, they shot relatively low in terms of specs and terms and conditions, and aimed to replace proprietary dumb and feature OSes as fast as possible.
However, once Apple opened their App Store(whether this was the plan all along, or in response to jailbreakers is unclear); Google had a problem: A huge percentage of "apps" were basically views of some entity's website; but iPhoneized. There were, and are, a lot that are much closer to traditional applications; but a lot are simply little chunks of the web that(because of the iPhone's commanding market share for web connected phones) could be iPhone only and still represent a viable "mobile strategy" for whoever put them out. At that point Google, sensibly enough, saw a real threat. To counter, they stepped up their android efforts and(while not cracking down on the low end, since the original objec
I'm pretty sure that Kin makes up less than .001% of that. WM 6.5, while pretty sucky, was(until fairly recently) your option for Exchange integration unless you could afford BES. Totally unsurprising to see some of that still floating around.
At the expense of the Canada/US/Europe (Blackberry/Apple/Nokia).
Seriously all those companies (Samsung/LG/HTC.....) would never have agreed on a standard OS if it wasn't for being scared into it by Apple /Blackberry.
Google really saved there hides by coming up with a very competent mobile OS.
A free OS with expectation of pumping us full of ads.
Seriously competition is frustrating when Apple/ Google start copying the worst parts of the OS (Google got rid of the return policy/ Apple buys an ad company)...
Not to mention the new trend of providers "Capping" all you can use mobile bandwidth.
Competition is good for consumers but I see a disturbing trend.
Sigh..
Hopefully because there are more players in this market "the web" remains a viable platform so the device matters less.
I don't own a smartphone....
I was mentioning that because you said that according to your linked article (and your posts title), iOS is #1 in the US (and might have been in the middle of Nov), but by the end of Nov Android was #1 in the US.
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
Err....
i'm puzzled why people think Google's ultimate aim was or should have been to make money on Android.
Maybe because they are a business????
Looks, it's really simple.
Apple makes iPhones, so that people buy iPhones, buy cell service from ATT (and soon Verizon), so that ATT (and soon Verizon) pay kick backs to Apple. Apple also generates revenue off Apps and Media sales.
Google built Android; so that Google can collect data, which is then used to better improve Google's searches. Improving Google's searches, and Google's ability to manipulate knowledge, enables Google to sell ads and other "in-the-cloud" services better.
For Apple, the iPhone is the platform. For Google, the Cloud is the platform. That's why iPhones are expensive, droid devices tend to be cheaper, and Google's network services are better.
Oh, and that's why Google builds services for other platforms; its not about selling Android phones, its about collecting data! Android phones collect data better than iPhones, but why limit the market?
And the mirror image of that is why the Apple App store is not available on other platforms; selling Applications is a secondary goal; selling iPhones (and the monolithic iOS ecosystem) is the primary goal, and the primary revenue driver.
People are going to have to understand that both companies are working for the betterment of mankind, but both companies seek to maximize revenue while they are at it. Google's profit drivers push Google toward being and omniscient, if usually benevolent big-brother in the cloud. Apple's profit drivers push Apple toward a monolithic ecosystem with Jobs firmly in control. But it is a *very* well designed ecosystem in which 3rd parties who are willing to play by the rules can prosper.
Shades of gray. Capitalism at work. The invisible hand. An exhibit in how pursuing the amoral in a competitive landscape can achieve the greater good.
*shrug*
basically. Google didn't monetize the hell out of it. that's a selling point. i'm tired of people / corporations thinking they can control me through their product just because they invented it. stop using your services as a launching platform for your personal holy crusades and simply provide people with what they want.
If that's what you are looking for, you should give up. Google's very clearly "giving away" services so that they can learn everything about you, and then tell Kraft exactly how many boxes of Mac and Cheese you might buy next month. For me, that's a reasonable trade-off; hell, you can argue that its a reasonable thing to make advertising "more relevant" and "more targeted".
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
If Microsoft doesn't explain what is going on or fix the problem people are having of random unexplained large data transfers, then WP7 will end up a has been. People are reporting 50MB transfers during calls, and 500MB transfers each night. I would never own a phone that randomly or without my knowledge started sending large amounts of data out.
http://windowsphonemix.com/news/unusual-usage-of-data/
Until this is addressed I would say Microsoft has a major issue. It is either a PR, such as it needs to be explained, or a software issue and it needs to be fixed. Either way the longer Microsoft doesn't address the issue the more it hurts them.
No. Apple's App Store sell way more Apps than the Android Store does. Android owners don't bother with apps as much, and when they do get them, they rarely pay. And yet even for Apple the income from Apps is dwarfed by iPhone hardware sales.
Besides Google have made it clear that the reason they did Android is because they want the income from Advertising - shame they didn't stop Microsoft from making deals with manufacturers to make Bing the default search engine.
It ain't hard to be number one when you have no competition. Let's see what you have to say about the situation come 2012.
Then Google it.
The feature is obvious:
* Plug in iPhone with iTunes open
* iPhone backs up automatically
If automatic syncing is turned off then do the following:
* Plug in iPhone
* Click iPhone in the left panel when it appears
* Click sync
The very first step of the sync process is backing up your phone, and it tells you it is doing that, every time you sync *unless* you sync shortly after already doing a full backup without disconnecting it or unlocking the phone with the slide control. The button is large and easy to see. And if the user has been using their phone "every week" then it will be immediately obvious.
Alternatively, if you want to use right click, you can do so by doing this:
* Plug in iPhone
* Right click on the iPhone when it appears in the left panel and select "back up".
Hunt around the net for how to back it up? Goodness me. Have you never used a computer before? It took you "over ten minutes" to find this? I'm amazed you managed to even register for a slashdot account. How did you find out how to submit the form?
Even if you had never used iTunes before, a computer literate person should have no trouble finding out how to back up an iPhone. I googled "how to back up iphone" also, and timed how long it took me to get to a page that told me how to do it: seven seconds, including the time it took me to open the tab and type the words and for the page to load. I could have shaved off some time by clicking "I'm feeling lucky" since I clicked on the top result, which was an Apple knowledgebase article.
Also, not to drag up that old flamebait nonsense, but the Mac has been supporting multi button mice since OS 8, and shipping with them since the mid 90s.
I'd argue that having an open platform that Google can ship their apps on is extremely important in the huge and quickly growing mobile space.
It would be unfortunate if the only game in town for mobile OSes were a closed platform where only software approved by the platform owner could be installed. How could one defend against such an eventuality? Perhaps one might invest in building a competitive open mobile platform and make it widely available, no strings attached.
The "collecting data" thing is a bit tinfoil hat-ish for me. I see it much more simply as "if it's impossible for users to use your apps because the dominant platforms are controlled by folks who shut the door on you, you're going to have trouble obtaining (or keeping) users."
When assessing a company's engineering capacity, neither its market cap, its employee count(without further detail), nor its annual revenue are really all that useful. Indirectly related; but not directly informative.
Apple's retail employees, for instance, are quite numerous; but they are utterly irrelevant to the question of how many distinct platforms Apple could hypothetically deliver high-quality builds of iOS on. Market cap and annual revenue are, if anything, higher because of their ability to succeed while delivering a very small number of products.
Using "relatively small" without qualification was unclear of me; but in the context of the engineering work that would be involved in keeping an OS playing nice on multiple embedded platforms Apple is, in fact, relatively small. They are a large company; but once you subtract their retail people, product/industrial designers, and software engineers working on non-OS related stuff(final cut, aperture, iLife, iWork, etc.) the remainder isn't particularly large.
Apple is having amazing growth in smartphones also and the inclusion of more carriers in the US may help them some. I know a lot of people who just won't do business with AT&T even for an iPhone. There are a lot of Verizon customers who would like to give it a go. The share numbers don't exactly tell the whole tale either as the market for smartphones is also growing at an amazing pace. Apple makes a lot of money on every phone, they're selling a huge number of phones, and they're having huge growth. They should see a good bump when they open up to other carriers in the US. Their vast economies of scale are saving them on the Cost Of Goods Sold also. Any time Apple wants to take market share from Android all they have to do is indulge in that fragmentation bugaboo that seems to not be holding Android back and offer a variety of phones with different feature sets and price points for the folk who aren't a good fit for The iPhone. Frankly I hope they don't - they're consuming a large enough share of the world's production capacity for displays and Flash memory already.
But Google and Apple are not Microsoft. Neither of them has taken the position that for them to win everybody else has to lose. Their goal is not to own the market and use their dominance to suppress progress like it's some tech version of King of the Hill. Apple is going to take for the most part the premium end of the business and Android will take the volume. They'll each get a chunk of RIM's enterprise share. Every developer worth their salt is writing for both platforms now so they're getting some app-fusion going on. In the end there will be a lot more Android phones than Apple phones if for no other reason than not everybody in the world can afford an iPhone and the iPhone feature set doesn't meet everybody's needs and can't, no matter how awesome that feature set is because people have conflicting needs. Some people need battery life, some daylight-readable displays, some huge storage, some need low price, some need a physical keyboard, some want the thinnest possible phone. Apple will get a bunch of dollars, Google will get many more dimes and it will work out well for both. They'll both innovate as fast as they can to compete with each other, so we all win.
Everybody else though? It sucks to be you. You can't have the premium end, you can't have the volume end. You can't crack enough market share to get good developers because one cheesy breakout app on iOS and Android (Angry Birds) moved 50 million units and that's the KaChing lotto developers are looking for. You can't get the mobile ad dollars either. If you create a niche hardware feature it'll be on an Android phone in six months. If you create a useful evolution of the user interface it'll be a UI skin available on both iOS and Android with a dozen competing versions in three weeks ranging in price from ten dollars to free, and the developers will make more money on the skin than you will on the platform. Apple and Google have between them got this thing sewn up. Just to make it completely unfair those app and media stores and the Google home page are awesome places from which to sell the next generation products that latecomers are not going to have access to.
Tablets? I don't see any reason why the same story shouldn't play out there. Android's getting a late start like it did with phones, but there's only one iPad just like there's only a couple models of iPhone. There are hundreds of Android slates coming out to hit every price point and feature desired. They're not quite too late to the party. Apple should get the premium end again with the lion's share of the profits at a good margin because they have the innovator's advantage, the product is damn good, and the iPad 2 will be even better. Android should get the volume again and have to work harder for their money but rake it in too. By the time a credible third player shows up we
Help stamp out iliturcy.
For years here on /. there were Vista fans who would not stop praising that piece of ineffable crap. A few persist still. It sucked. We all knew it sucked. "Buy a new PC" they would say, and the replies came back - "It is a new PC and it came with this crap." And still they would not quit. A thousand sockpuppets praising it from your Bangalore blog center are not going to make it not suck. Berating honest folk who tried it and share their sucky experience are not going to make it fly, nor quench the flood of people who are reporting that yes, it does have negative atmospheric pressure. The problem with it wasn't the marketing. It was the engineering. To get some traction here on /. and in the real world, the thing has to actually not suck.
WP7 is not good. It's not even close to good. It STILL lacks features like multitasking and copy & paste in 2011. A new contender doesn't have to have some good stuff - it has to hit all the corners and then have something special nobody else has got. Some new WP7 features are now promised, but updates to the KIN were promised too. Top-ten category apps are moving in the single digits of units - lifetime, not monthly or daily. It is a joke on itself.
I'm rereading this before posting, and am finding that this part doesn't have enough emphasis. So I'll say it plain: There are Top Ten apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace that have five sales total ever. This is not going to fund a development budget. They've reached 5,000 apps now so the vast majority of developers have to have no buyers at all, and probably less than a dozen downloads too. That is some serious suction.
Microsoft has somehow pushed 1.5M units into inventory at the merchants, probably on consignment, but they have no hope of actually selling them. The backlash when this all unravels will be epic.
Do you want to make a product that gets the /. crowd fawning all over you? I'll tell you how: raise the bar. Deliver something that does something current tech won't do. Make something that enables and empowers us to do the stuff that we want and need to do. Let us connect better with the people we care about. Let us get our work done more easily. And when we want that, get the hell out of our way.
Quit trying to believe that enough money thrown at marketing will put over a product that sucks. I know the advertisers you're working with say they can sell a turd sandwich, but we're not buying it. Their job isn't really to sell us stuff, it's to sell you advertising.
We here know that KIN had 300,000 facebook friends and under a thousand buyers. You can't put that BS over here any more. Try PCWORLD or Computerworld or whatever. They'll take your ad money and fluff your dolphin, or whatever the euphemism is today.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
People are going to have to understand that both companies are working for the betterment of mankind,
Uh no. Neither company is working for the betterment of mankind. They are working only for their own betterment. Any improvement of the lot of the rest of us will be coincidental. Arguably, selling people phones they don't really need is just squandering our precious natural resources; both corporations (these are not book clubs or charities, but public corporations whose primary goal is to make a profit and maximize shareholder value) are arguably doing harm to the entire world.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
When it expires and Apple is allowed to sell the iPhone with whoever they want, Google is going to be hurting.
Doubt it. Remember that the carrier exclusivity of the iPhone only exists in the US and maybe one or two other countries. In the vast majority of the world, it's a GSM phone like any other that you buy, pop your SIM card in (from any carrier) and off you go. And in all those countries, Android is doing quite well.
So I don't think the carrier exclusivity is holding Apple's sales in the US back as much as you might think. I mean, sure, it has SOME effect. But Android is a quality platform and I don't think the population of "people who would have got an iPhone but for their carrier" is ~that~ significant (I mean, if you REALLY wanted an iPhone in the US, wouldn't you just change carrier?)
Disclaimer: I own an iPhone 4 and like it a lot. However I am not a blind fanboi: Android is pretty sweet too. I've used both and both have some points better than the other.
Exactly, I am waiting to ditch my IPhone TODAY! Why? I love the phone but ATT is the biggest joke I have seen, it is unusable! Just yesterday I got a text from my daughter about bringing home pizza for dinner, 2 weeks ago!! This is not unusual for my ATT "service" dropped calls "no network" are a daily thing with ATT. So when My contract is up August 2011 my Iphone is gone and I am buying an android smart phone with ANYBODY else but ATT.
The global numbers are more amusing. Over the year, Nokia/Symbian has retained its majority market share, only dropping 7% in a market that has grown 64%; with Android and iOS more or less in equal competition for second place. (Source)
For some reason the discussion on the completely distorted US marketplace is amusing. But I question the relevance.
And finally, let me add that I vastly prefer my phone run an operating system that is designed to run phones, not an app or advertising channel primarily, no matter how shiny it looks.
Mart
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Perhaps you're so deluded by your fan-boism that you don't realise what the /. crowd generally find distasteful about the iPhone and iPad. It's not that it's from Apple (Macs are generally still well-liked around here, partially based on the BSD kernel - though I have no use for Macs myself). It's the lock-in. In general, /. hates lock-in from any vendor. Heck, I remember even ChromeOS getting the hate-on for being so locked down, and that's from one of our favourite companies (Google) based on one of our favourite OS's (Linux). It's not Apple. It's lock-in.
If I could flip a switch to say, "I'm an advanced user, get out of my way," on either the iPhone or the iPad, I'm sure it wouldn't be nearly so bad. Some way to get arbitrary applications from arbitrary locations would solve pretty much the whole /. issue with these devices. That there isn't even a secondary app-store that is recognised by the devices in the meantime also grates on the collective consensus. If there was at least competition in stores, that would mitigate, though not eliminate, concerns. Yes, newbs would have to look in multiple places to find what they want, but since nearly everything goes through a search engine anyway, that's probably not such a big deal.
In the meantime, the disregard your attitude gets on /. is simply for your lack of stand for freedom. Instead of saying "I am happy with the device," people may be expecting you to say "I may be happy with the device, but it's too locked down for general use, so I'm going to vote against lock-in and not buy it to discourage vendors from attempting such restrictions on freedom." Maybe that's a bit harsh of a requirement, though I understand where it comes from. (Largely, a mob-mentality on some issues. Oddly, /. seems to have multiple mobs on issues, so there is likely a mob that supports you, too.)
So first you are claiming that Apple's marketshare is composed of a single phone (when it's actually 4) and now you are adding in the iPad. What a sad, fanboy hypocrite you are.
From the article you linked to:
"Android OS is still the best-selling smartphone OS among recent acquirers in the last six months, with a 40.8 percent share, compared to 26.9 percent for iOS and 19.2 percent for RIM."
I'm sure the Verizon iPhone is going to reverse that trend. ;)
Except you are wrong. The article refers to "Total U.S. Smartphone Subscribers Ages 13+"; it would include any Apple "smartphone" of which there are several. The point is moot, either Android has passed iOS or it is about to. Why you are motivated to lie about this is the interesting question.
Does it really matter?
Yes, it does matter.
I'm a Mac user. I have been for 20+ years. I have two Macs, an AppleTV, and four iPods in the house. So I'm not religiously opposed to Apple, far from it.
But I am utterly opposed to a future where the hardware vendor is allowed to decide what software is allowed to run on computers. That's why I want to see iOS fail. I want to see it drop to single digit market share and be abandoned by developers. I want it to fail so badly that nobody ever tries the same thing again. Same for Windows 7 Phone.
...Though if Steve Jobs added a jailbreak checkbox in the preferences and opened up the platform, I'd probably buy in immediately. Though frankly at this point Android is blatantly outstripping iOS in capability, so Apple's window of opportunity to open the platform and get more buy-in is closing quickly.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
You're backtracking, having been called on something. I might as well say "lolz, Windows bluescreens all the time, you have to reboot it every night" but it doesn't make it true, and using it as an argument for something totally unrelated is just nonsense.
Your eMac supports a two button mouse, and always has. All of the menus and OS, plus shipped apps support it. Reality wins again!
That "crappy interface" that confused the user is not the issue - a "well educated computer literate" user that took over 10 minutes to solve a problem with the help files available (under a minute to find the right bit, with a walk through) or via google (under 7 seconds to search for and load a relevant page, but he said that the guy's computer had "some restrictive internet policy" that apparently blocks google, but only mentions this after I bring it up) is seriously clutching at straws.
The interface may be a little less streamlined than a dedicated phone sync app, since the iPhone features were grafted on, but it's not *that bad* that it takes a computer literate person all that time to work out. Even just randomly pressing buttons gets you to the right thing, or just right clicking on various UI elements (like the iPhone, displayed in the side menu for example) that has it all listed for him.
If he's going to play the "oh woe is me, it's so hard! the UI is so bad I can't find anything I need!" then I can play the "yep, you're stupid" card in response.
Somebody mentioned that Jobs stated that the Macintosh was meant to be an "appliance". He meant it then as something common in every home or business - easy to use - not needing to be a genius to operate (back in 1984, that was the case for most people). I had a Apple DU - the Macintosh 128K as it was called before general release. I went to Drexel where we were forced to buy Macs (and, I fought it and I had just purchased an IBM PC with 64K of memory and a single floppy disk a year earlier using my own money).
iOS apps are restricted to the App Store. That is true - unless you jailbreak your device. If that negatively affects Apple's revenue, they will alter course as they have done in the past.
Java - I'd love to see Java apps accepted. But, a decision has been made and Apple is providing the tools to make it happen. There is nothing that precludes Mac apps from being sold by independents - and, that includes Java apps. Could it change? Possibly. Don't expect to see Java on the iPhone or iPad, though.
If iOS becomes the OS for Macs....and we see a closed environment ... that WILL piss people off ... including me. But, right now, I have a choice. I can choose to develop for Apple OSX and iOS or I can choose to develop for Android or both. And, I can continue to develop for Windows (I prefer Java and Delphi). The linux environment, while a great OS, still hasn't reached a point where its consumer friendly. Businesses will embrace it, though. It took Apple and Google to make *nix environments friendly. Why is that?
So, it doesn't matter. If Apple wants to stay relevant, they will need to give the customer what they ultimately want or another ecosystem will evolve and endanger them. So far, the Apple ecosystem and Android/Google ecosystem (and even MS Windows) ecosystems can co-exist.
Uh, no. It is perfectly accurate. It just depends if you are a consumer or a stock holder. If you are a stock holder, knowing that iPhone has more sales and bigger profit margins than the rest of the individual makers is important. If you are a consumer, knowing that there are a shit ton of competing phones with a single operating system and ecosystem is important. One assumes that Slashdot is not the business section, so what people care about is the largest platform with the most phones. Apple clearly is not that. They have almost zero selection in terms of phones, and they are not the largest ecosystem.
Next time I get a new Android phone, I'll have dozens of phones to pick from that all of my stuff will happily migrate over to. The iPhone users get the choice of the current generation phone, or the old generation phone which they are busy patching to its destruction. From a consumer perspective, having the most phones running Android, with the greatest phone selection, with brutal competition by multiple hardware makers is a GOOD thing. For stock holders, Apple milking the crap out of a minority of consumers and scoring high profit margins off of them and creating an ecosystem where others can't compete is a good thing. Guess which one of those two the Slashdot crowd cares about?
The only complaint about the iPhone is you can only use it on AT&T.
The only complaint? Really? Do you read much? Does "walled garden", "antenna-gate" or "unusable 3G/3Gs with iOS 4 until 4.2" ring a bell? What about continuous problems with syncing, data restoration and lost contacts? Overall, iOS is much less buggy than Android I will agree, but claiming that the only complaint about the iPhone is AT&T is just bunk.
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
OK, I'm tired of people acting like Android isn't locked down to the end user as much as the iPhone is.
It's not an act. My Android phone allows me to install any application software I like, from any source, without having to jailbreak it or engage in any kind of hackery. The iPhone does not. Same goes for every T-Mobile Android phone. The only locked down Android phone is one of AT&T's.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
It almost certainly won't be, at least this year. My bet is a GSM/CDMA "iPhone 5" model (using the Qualcomm dual-transmitter chip) that runs on any US network this year, with a 4G "iPhone 6" next year, or perhaps with "iPhone 7" in 2013 (which, coincidentally, is when Verizon predicts their LTE coverage will "match current 3G area.")
The LTE chips are still very power-hungry, which means you either carry around a big battery pack, or you get sub-par battery life when 4G is active. It's also available in only a couple dozen cities around the US so far, with plans for "aggressive growth" this year and next. Early adopters may want the 4G, but that feature is pretty pointless outside of a fairly small number of urban areas. My guess is Apple doesn't want to limit itself to 10% of Verizon's customers, and will push for an initial release that will appeal to lots of people - a 3G-capable phone. I suspect we'll see one GSM & CDMA version, rather than two separate "Verizon" and "AT&T" versions, because Apple tends to favor simplicity in its product lineup, with a few key differentiators that are easily grasped: 16/32GB; Black/White. I don't see them willingly entering into a "Black/White, 16/32, GSM/CDMA, 3G/4G" type of model lineup - gets too confusing too quickly for customers.
Of course, this is just pure speculation, but I think it's the most likely course, given Apple's recent history and current product lineup.
This article is stupid. It's comparing a single smartphone to an entire platform running on multiple smartphones. When you compare platforms, iOS is #1 in U.S. marketshare according to the recent Nielsen report.
Beware of what's being counted, and how.
The Nielsen report you cited lumps iPad users in with iPhone users. That's hardly a single platform; the iPad is far more akin to a laptop or netbook in terms of "mobility" than a smartphone. It's also based on Nielsen's Web usage monitoring, and it's well-known that iPad users are very heavy Web browsers -- mostly from home.
Overall, I find the tech "journalism" about this issue to be a dismal example of the innumeracy that mars much of the profession. Reading tech blogs, I can't tell what's being counted: Web unique users? Pageviews? Units sold? Units in a distribution pipeline? Activated smartphone accounts?
Each number has its own importance to different interested parties. Fanbois can pick the one that reinforces their word view. Those of us building mobile websites or applications need to know the difference between users and usage, and between the iPad and the iPhone.
What I've found, looking at (I am being very specific here) mobile Web pageview counts by users of pocket-sized devices connected to mobile networks, is that Android smartphones are racing way, way, way ahead of the iPhone.
I don't really care that some of the devices are made by Motorola and some by Samsung and some by LG, because I'm not fanboi-ing for any manufacturer; I'm just trying to understand how the mobile market is unfolding for planning purposes.
If I were planning to develop an app, that information would be an important factor in prioritizing my platform targeting. (I actually am persuaded by this and other data that standards-based HTML5 mobile Web, is the better place to focus.)
Incidentally, the same data set tells me that Blackberry users pretty much stick to email and barely show up on the mobile Web. Windows Mobile is every bit as dead as everybody expected.
I like the iPhone, don't get me wrong - but you're off the mark here.
Arguing that you can't compare iPhones to Android by market share is simply a semantic quibble. Better stated, the study compares "All phones that run iOS" versus "All phones that run Android." It just so happens that "all phones that run iOS" are "iPhones," and so it's more convenient for the authors to say they're comparing "iPhones" to "Android".
The comparison stands: in the smartphone market, Android has taken a small, but very real lead over iOS. This is not necessarily a bad thing: competition makes both platforms better. I don't see a future where "every phone is Android," and I think it's entirely possible that Apple would be content with 20-25% share of a very profitable market while Android expands down into the less-expensive end (where margins are very thin, a space where Apple has historically avoided competing), and ends up with a much larger slice of the phone market than Apple's iOS devices.
You must be referring to the chart in that wikipedia article. It's talking about the new phone sales, not total installed base. I've corrected the chart's heading to better reflect that.
-deane
Nah. Because then cell companies would have to compete based on features rather than supposed technical advantages of their underlying technology. That's CRAZY talk. Next thing you know, people can use (gasp) UNLOCKED cell phones on any carrier they choose, then it's utter chaos when customers aren't locked into their comfortable multi-year agreements with multi-hundred-dollar early termination fees! Why, that'd be unAmerican!
Here in 'Merika, we believe in this thing called the "free market" which means companies are "free" to screw us over.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Correction, it warns you *very explicitly* that your are not syncing with your "home" computer, and you have to click through at least two warnings that it will restore your phone if you proceed to sync with a new computer.
It doesn't just "rebuild your phone".
You get plenty of warning.