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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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.'"
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'?
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
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.
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.