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Android Passes Symbian As Most-Shipped Mobile Platform
nk497 writes "Symbian is no longer the most-shipped mobile platform, with Android finally knocking Nokia's OS out of the number one position. Manufacturers shipped 32.9 million Android devices in Q4 of last year, compared to 31 million Symbian devices, according to Canalys. That gives Google a 33% share of the global mobile market, over 31% for Nokia's Symbian. 'It's gone from nowhere to number one in the space of two years, which is pretty impressive,' Canalys analyst Pete Cunningham said, predicting Android would double its growth rate this year."
"Smartphone" platform (or at least what is at this day considered one by pundits); S40 is the most-shipped mobile platform by a very wide margin.
... hopefully without the pitfalls of MS / already Google could fix some aspects: for example some functions relying a bit too much, unnecesserily, on data access - good for Google, great for carriers, not so great for too many potential users, we don't need such things repeating)
The other news - Symbian is the first smarthpone platform which broke annual shipments of 100 million units. Because you know, it also has big growth / more than overall growth of mobile sales / the whole market is expanding (including one quite unusual - also in basically not having any Nokia presence - place finally allowed by carriers its share of growth in smartphones and their shipments there)
Plus, generally, I wouldn't mind a landscape analogous to browser marketshare in Ukraine or Russia; but if you prefer a repeat of desktop OS situation... (that said, Nokia will probably adopt also Android relatively soon, and they should quickly catch up via their supply/etc. chains - similar to how Samsung is at the top despite late start - and so the new PC/MS-DOS/Wintel, in mobile world, will fully arrive
Another big news - ZTE (yeah, ever heard of them?) is now in the top5 of mobile phone vendors - ahead of RIM, only behind Nokia, Samsung and LG.
One that hath name thou can not otter
wake me up when android phones on vibrate pass sybian's market share.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
For a second, I thought it read as "Android passes Sybian for most shipped mobile platform" and I couldn't help but wonder, what this new android vibrator was, and since when did Sybian have a mobile version.
In fact, the Android version on a locked down Samsung can't run much that an Android 3.0 device can.
Citation needed.
That gives Android a 33% share of the global mobile market
Google has a heavy hand in Android, but doesn't necessarily "own" it. Quoth http://source.android.com/
We wanted to make sure that there was no central point of failure, so that no industry player can restrict or control the innovations of any other. That's why we created Android, and made its source code open.
"No industry player can restrict or control the innovations of any other" supposedly includes Google too.
Gee, they really have it in for Nokia. Symbian is "ailing" at slightly less than 2 million units less than the market leader. I bet Microsoft would like its mobile platform to be ailing by that much!
They are apparently a "struggling mobile firm", while at the same time it "retains solid market share" and sales of units are "still growing well". While nobody would argue that Nokia's marketshare hasn't slipped, it does seem to be too much damnation of what is "still the number one handset manufacturer".
I'd like to see the os breakdown of phones that are getting replaced this year.
Java has done great, and it has very little cpu overhead. Dalvik on the other hand is getting better but has some real drawbacks, but still not insane overhead.
santa just bought me an adroid in december and i already can tether wifi to it if my laptop loses internet. Android has a riduculous amount of free apps and is relatively stable. plus they are going the microsoft route of letting any number of hardware vendors use the os, so they will soon have a huge dominant market share.
and the ironic part is that its linux
ios is boring, I love the android system
Free mp3 & Music Download Library
FTA: "In the last quarter of 2010, manufacturers shipped 32.9 million Android devices"
Apple sold more iOS devices in their last quarter. 16.24 million iPhones, 7.33 million iPads, and over 9.25 million iPod touches (19.45 million iPods, over half of which were iPod touches, but they didn't give a breakdown). That's over 32.8 million iOS devices. I didn't include the 2 million Apple TVs.
Also, Apple's numbers are actual hard figures. Android sales figures are all based on estimates because there is no place to get proper numbers from. Samsung, for example, recently claimed to have sold 2 million Galaxy Tabs, but when pressed on it, stated that's how many are in stock at stores, not how many have been sold (elaborating that *actual* sales are much, much lower). This is from an analyst who has reported the highest numbers.
None of this is to say that Android is not doing great. It is. But reality is not quite what the headline states.
I would be interested in speculation about what Microsoft's Ballmer thinks about this kind of news.
If I were him, I would find ways of commingling popular Microsoft services and software like Bing, Hotmail, IE, and the MS Office suite to only work on Windows 7. Then I'd sit down and watch cash from licensing flowing in.
It would be IE vs Netscape all over again.
most shipped isn't most sold ..... ...... just means someone has a warehouse full of androids
also how many companies are now making android vs apple? How many companies takes it take to topple apple? If it is say 5 companies vs apple then i'll be impressed when they outsell 5 to 1.
Shipped isn't selling
Not biased, i use both, just stating cause i hate these clever marketing terms like "shipping"
... would still be in last place even if they counted shipping out plus returns.
Have gnu, will travel.
Overall, Android is more of a flash in the pan than anything else. Once developers realize there is no future with the platform, they will focus on iOS or platforms that matter.
I'd be curious to see just how much money you'd be willing to wager that this is so...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Bing? LOL
Hotmail? LOL
IE? LOLOLOL
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
When is Nokia going to come to its senses and switch to Android? Then, they'll be the biggest manufacturer with the most popular OS.
Seriously.
Nokia has a huge brand name and while I can't stand the bastards (I've delt with their support before) your average phone consumer loves a nokia phone, still huge brand recognition.
They need to maintain their brand name and release phones with Android on them, it should keep them relevant for the future.
If Symbian is so widespread, how is it that I've never handled nor seen a device that ran it?
> It would be IE vs Netscape all over again
Except this time, Netscape is metaphorically Microsoft's product, and IE smells like fresh, hot gingerbread. Mmmmm!
Take away Google, and the streets will riot, Take away Bing, and... er... um... someone might eventually notice. Maybe.
Hotmail? Is that actually used for anything besides MSDN SSO credentials anymore?
IE? (rolling on the floor, gasping for breath amidst near-lethal amounts of laughter). People with *Windows Mobile* didn't even use Internet Explorer before Android came out. We used Opera, and paid for it, because Pocket IE sucked like a whore with braces. I'm sure Microsoft did a much better job with IE on WP7... but then again, a chimp with a Commodore 64 and a pirated copy of GEOS could probably improve upon PIE in its WM6.x incarnation.
MS Office Suite? Meh. Apps to view and edit word/excel docs are free and abundant. Outlook still can't do adhoc aliases properly, and Android can be induced to lie about its authentication capabilities so you won't have to indulge your company's IT department's wet dreams by entering a 16-digit passcode before it allows you to answer an incoming phone call.
Google has done a great job of developing android. Their success owes largely to the os community. The community can rejoice in a successful development with mass appeal and consumer adoption, even if the business model behind it is ads base drive. It remain to be seen how the legal issue with Oracle works out but at the moment The OS movement is a critical success.
You're assuming that everyone wants Bing, Hotmail, IE, and the MS Office suite. Only business people want Office and even then they don't really want the suite as they much the ability to open their documents. Most consumers don't care about it. As for the other things: They really don't care about Bing. They just want search. Until WP7's version of IE, it sucked so much no one used it. Hotmail? Seriously, I don't anyone who really uses it. Even then, they don't care about it as much as they care about email.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Heres a list of OS by manufacturer
If everyone jumps onboard the OS is going to dominate the market. Take Windows for example, any PC manufacturer can preload it on their machine's for sale. MacOS....not so much(Hackintoshs excluded)
no wonder you posted as AC.
I am not that sure about Bing...you're right I guess. But for Microsoft Office, everyone I know uses the suite. The trouble is that the longer MS waits, the more irrelevant their products become.
In fact, one could argue that folks at Microsoft would be better served if they adopted Android, then changed the default search engine to Bing Search, Bing Maps and Travel, exploited its openness to push Microsoft services and apps down users' throats.
That would yield better results than their current strategy.
I've stayed with Nokia for several years now. They make interesting stuff. But there are a few things that just seem behind.
Not only do you get lots of menus and configuration features where as other phones "just work", they seem to lack application development. Most apps that come out now have iPhone or Android versions. It can be quite a task to find a decent Sybian equivalent. For all of Nokia's promos of QT, it doesn't seem to be making huge head way in that department
Actually, I've found to my considerable surprise that Bing is a decent service. I don't see any particular advantage it offers over google, but if google suddenly vanished I could get by without it now.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The number of Android phones shipped is impressive, but that's spread over a number of hardware companies. On the other hand, all the iOS phone sales have a direct revenue benefit to Apple. I guess it's the same for Nokia sales.
Because I'm lazy I haven't bothered to research how many Android phones each hardware company ships, but I'd be surprised if any have profits from their Android phones close the the profits Apple makes from the iPhone. I'm not aware of any direct revenue that Android contributes to Google although there may well be some indirect revenue.
The only place where Android versus iOS really matters is in the number of developers coding for each platform. If hardware sales are low then software sales will be low, and developers will move to other platforms. If Android fragments too much and developers end up supporting substantially different versions of a product this could have an impact also. If hardware manufacturers don't update their Android systems for at least a couple of years after a phone's introduction that could have an effect also. It's possible, perhaps likely, that Apple will have some advantage in both these last two areas because of the way they can control the full package - hardware, operating system, development tools, the apps store and product marketing.
I'm not aware of any direct revenue that Android contributes to Google
A number of good apps are ad supported, ads being Google's biggest business. I wonder how many google ads the average android user sees in a day?
The iPhone becomes available for preorder for Verizon customers starting at 3am eastern time on February 3rd.
Lets see how the sales jump in three days shall we.
Got Code?
test
Am glad that Android is a more popular mobile platform than a female masturbation device.
https://www.sybian.com
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
by what measure? In purely social and economic terms, I would argue that the exact inverse of your title is true: the more efficient a market is the closer prices will be to the marginal cost of a product. In the case of a tool / platform like a smartphone, this means that the greatest possible number of consumers will have access to valuable resource and therefore the high volume low margin product has the potential to generate significantly greater economic activity and social benefit than the low volume high margin luxury player in the marketplace. That's not to say that profit doesn't have value from certain perspectives, but from the consumer's standpoint it's all about maximum access and minimum profit to the manufacturer.
Uh, he actually stated right after the 32.8 million that he still needs to add the 2 million Apple TV's, which would put iOS at 34.8 million. You should probably finish reading people's posts before you start flaming them.
Hey, if Android could overtake Apple like that, I'm not going to bet against Microsoft... historically, they tend to always be behind Apple getting to the marketplace, but still somehow end up at the front of the line.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Google is the verb "to search", ex: "I Google my dates to make sure they're not supercreeps."
Bing is the verb "to force an unwanted search engine", ex: "Verizon Binged my Droid."
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I'd like to see the number of Linux devices shipped/sold last quarter. If you count all the Android devices, ebooks, tablets, wireless routers, mediaboxes, intelligent appliances etc etc it's gotta be an impressive number.
but what phones have symbian? Is it the generic one for most dumbphones?
They don't have to fall to second place. They just have to lose control. Once the PC OEMs aren't afraid of them any more the rest just happens naturally. This is already happening. HP didn't buy Palm because they thought Windows was going to make a great tablet OS. Then they get sulky and start trying to twist arms like they're the 800 lb. gorilla still and their former friends stay away in droves. Dell and ASUS have similar stories.
It won't be too much longer now before it's obvious to everybody.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The last time my android knocked the sybian machine out... Oh wait, wrong forum. (it was quite a show, nevertheless)
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Yeah. See, the Android phones aren't really selling. The manufacturers just want to make them look like they're selling. So last quarter they shipped $10 billion worth of phones to a Carphone Warehose stripmall outlet in Chicago, which is now using the full boxes as construction materials to build a warehouse to house this quarter's shipment.
They've been doing this at an ever-increasing rate since October 2008, when the first Android phone shipped.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
And in the next quarter when the number of Android smartphones shipped surpasses the number of iOS smartphones, media players, tablets and set-top-boxes (which don't even run iOS apps) combined, he'll want to start including the emulators shipped with the SDK. What next?
Hey, if Android could overtake Apple like that, I'm not going to bet against Microsoft... historically, they tend to always be behind Apple getting to the marketplace, but still somehow end up at the front of the line.
Wow! I was just thinking about the zune too.
grape - the GNU free, open source rape
"The longer that microsoft wait,the more irrelevant their products become".......... This is true, but also, the less time there is between updates, the more it undoes their vendor lock in. their customers will get more and more dissatisfied at having to do another expensive upgrade which may break backwards compatibility. There are still many people, companies and institutions running winXP,and there is already talk of windows 8. So while they can't afford to lag behind competition, they also can't afford to release upgrades too quickly. I'm making a guess that their revenues from windows and office sales have been declining. People may,at some point, refuse to spend more of their money on upgrading,and if antagonised by microsoft with lack of updates, they may just start looking towards open source or/and free alternatives. microsoft is a large company and they probably can't afford to sell win8 and office whatever at a competitive enough price to lure new customers,or convince a few existing ones to upgrade.
It's not "all" about the profit. It's really about what's good enough. I love my iPhone, but gee, if someone likes their Android phone, I'm the last person to tell them that they shouldn't. Some in this community insist that you've got to be a geek to want Android, and that you've got to want Android to have geek cred, but I think that's total BS. Dozens of manufacturers will sell millions of Android-based smart-phones and devices next year. And Microsoft will sell (a smaller number) of WP7 and Slate devices. And Apple will sell what they sell, and they'll make a fine living off of whatever the final volume is.
I don't know why anyone in this group really cares about who's number one--in units, profits or other metrics. I'm in geek heaven; I've got a wide variety of platforms to choose from, from a wide variety of manufacturers. I'm on my iOS honeymoon right now, but in two years, maybe it'll be Android 5.8 for me. Or WP8. Or WebOS4. You know who wins? All of us. Well, also the wireless network service providers, too. Mostly them. But to some degree, us, too.
Given the state of symbian. Bought a series 60 v5 device last year. Came to a few conclusions.
1. Nokia thinks ALL their customers are mentally retarded. It's form over function all the way
2. I've handled many operating systems over the years and symbian is, after OS/400, the second one I couldn't get to grips with
3. Only Nokia can make a semi high-end device that's all plastic, creaks and has worse gps performance than a $25 GPS receiver from ebay.
It used to be that I saw iPhones everywhere, but now when I look around when on the train I see nothing but Droids. I have also surprisingly seen no few android phones in other countries, although Nokias still seem to be more popular.
Has anyone ever managed to uninstall all the "use Google so we can have your data" Apps that Android comes with? I must check if there is an acceptance somewhere in the process that lets you agree to Google's "gimme all your data for naathink, naathink" ToC clauses 11.1 and 11.2. I do not trust the words "free" and "open" when it's spoken by Google, it still is a US company.
Until such time I consider Android as a dangerous land grab on the phone and mobile devices market - and it's thus not free. The price seems to be again user privacy.
(caveat here: I have no reason to assume Apple is any better)
To put your argument in context, the new figures give Apple a global 51% revenue share. They're officially making more money on mobile phones than everyone else in the world put together.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I believe this to be true too. They use all their marketing resources to get them boosted above all others.
I love Bones new phone. I was just watching Human Target and watched the winphone interface while Ames took and hung up her call. Normally they'd just push a button and you never see the screen. But Microsoft is paying for some good screen time.
They will win. It is history.
The answer i all the tablet, netbooks and other gizmos churned out en masse from China, that run Android (because it's easy to implement being so open, and pretty much free.) They are all 'mobile devices'.
Meanwhile, Symbian almost doesn't exist outside of phones. Psion palmtops are pretty much dead and the rest of the world uses all kinds of more developer-friendly systems on phones.
I wonder what the mobile phone market share is.
In other news, mobile phones without OS* still outnumber phones with an OS 10:1.
*) Yeah, I know, technically what is running on them -is- some kind of OS, if you stretch the definition of OS some.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Nokia shipped 123.7 million phones in 2010 Q4. Out of them smart phones were the quoted 31 million. So the summary should say that Android overtakes Symbian in the smart phone segment, not all mobile phones. Those over 90 million phones are cheaper models running S40 etc. That makes Symbian still the most-shipped mobile platform.
Sources:
http://www.intomobile.com/2011/01/27/nokia-q4-2010-sales-up-profits-down/
http://www.nokia.com/press/press-releases/showpressrelease?newsid=1482864
To put your argument in context, the new figures give Apple a global 51% revenue share. They're officially making more money on mobile phones than everyone else in the world put together.
It's amazing how a company eeking an extreme profit margin out of their users is hailed as a positive by some here - on a geek site! I would expect this from gordongeckoismyidol.com.
I'm not so sure about these numbers.
Q4 phone sales - Apple: 16.2 million handsets, Nokia: 123.7 million handsets, Android: 32.9 million handsets.
The majority of Nokia phones have some version of Symbian on them (S60, Series 80, S40, ^3).
There is a big mistake in the article if Symbian sales are claimed to be only 31 million.
I'm not average, but on an average day, I see none.
root handset; install adfree; experience little or no advertising.
(I don't mind paying for things that I use, but I do not want to see advertising for things that I will never want.)
Kid-proof tablet..
This press release is not talking about actual Android alone but about "Google OS-based smart phones (Android, OMS and Tapas)". OMS and Tapas are chinese Android-based systems with not a single Google app on them. By this count Android could theoretically reach nearly market domination in a few years without you seeing an Android phone at all...
The chinese market is huge. And there is little doubt that Android will become for Smartphones worldwide what Symbian was/is for dumbphones. Doesn't mean that much, though. Most of those phones won't mean a single dollar for Google or for Android app developers. It also won't mean much for users, since these Systems aren't really compatible with "real" Android.
Still, Android *is* on its way to world domination. We will have to see if this is a good thing or not.
Who said it was a positive?
That said, the extreme profit margin's not coming from users, as near as I can tell. The on-contract and SIM-free price of the iPhone is at a parity with smartphones from rival vendors. The advantage is either at the manufacturing end, or in the wholesale price they charge the networks.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Google runs Android Market and takes a cut from all the sales there. And handset manufacturers who want to put the proprietary Google apps on their phones surely pay licensing fees for those?
Presumably "global" sales ignores the hundred million or so essentially disposable BREW-based smartphones that Samsung et al churn out in the far east every year?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
historically, they tend to always be behind Apple getting to the marketplace, but still somehow end up at the front of the line
You mean...once? (a big one to be sure, but...)
One that hath name thou can not otter
I'd think that current app store numbers would bear his statement out. Supposedly Android is crushing iOS, but the available apps don't seem to follow the same trend. And it's been well documented that if you're an app developer you are going to find it hard to make a living selling Android apps, but the likelihood of doing well is much better in the iOS ecosystem.
I have nothing against Android, but I do think the hype is a bit overblown.
I think that statement is probably correct, if you're measuring by "number of units sold" rather than "total money extracted from 'consumers'."
Something that is more expensive and less "common" is more hip and cool and therefore seem more valuable to people with more disposable income, which seems to be Apple corporation's target market (and as much as I despise the Apple environment personally, I can't argue that this isn't a very good business plan. It's much more profitable to sell only half as many units as the market leader, but at double the markup, for example.)
The same sort of confusion seems to go around reports of "market share" in server sales, which usually seem to be reported in terms of dollars spent rather than "actual pieces of hardware shipped", which inflates the "market share" of devices with more expensive hardware and higher license fees.
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
If you look at the actual marketplace, this should come as no surprise. Carriers are basically giving away android phones. My boss just picked up a Samsung Vibrant for $30.
An AT&T sells new 8GB iPhone 3GS's for $49. So, yeah, the cheapest new Android phone is cheaper than the cheapest new iOS-based phone, and the most expensive new Android phone is probably more expensive than the most expensive new iOS based phone, and there are orders of magnitude more options -- and more meaningful choices between them -- between the low and the high.
But what you point to isn't an example of "giving away" Android phones.
The answer i all the tablet, netbooks and other gizmos churned out en masse from China, that run Android (because it's easy to implement being so open, and pretty much free.)
Except that its not. While TFA uses the word "mobile", the source it cites is a market report from Canalys, which actually found that Android has displaced Symbian as the #1 smartphone OS. So none of those tablets, netbooks, and "other gizmos" that aren't smartphones had any effect.
DOS, Windows, Servers, Handhelds (iPaq)... there's a much longer list than 1 ;)
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
I'm pretty tired of the uninformed that talk about having to get Android apps running on hundreds of devices. All you have to do is design your screens to be dynamic and gracefully bow out of functionality the device may not support. It's the same as writing halfway decent code for the browser. Do you always know what resolution the user will have set or whether or not their browser is maximized? What do you do when they hit print but do not have a printer set up?
I've already begun to give up on iOS. Way too locked down, their app approval process is frustrating at best (and special approval for background services since the devices really don't multitask), no sideloading (unless it's jailbroken), Objective C sucks... it's just not worth the hassle. If I can get Appcelerator or Phonegap working fine I MAY stick with iOS apps but it's not likely otherwise.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
Consider the apps in Marketplace and the App Store. Marketplace has surpassed 200,000 apps, App Store has surpassed 300,000. How many duplicates are there in each store? How many different fart or gun sound apps do you actually need?
Pound for pound, the same apps exist in both stores. It's the duplication at this point that keeps them seperate. Choice is good, but there comes a point when oversaturation just confuses users. Which mail app do I like this week? How many background changers is too many?
And I think you're thinking a bit backwards on making a living selling apps. If the App Store has more apps, and Android is outselling iOS, it should be easier to make money selling Android apps. I can attest to that personally.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
What he said back in 1981:
Overall, MS-DOS is more of a flash in the pan than anything else. Once developers realize there is no future with the platform, they will focus on Apple ][ or platforms that matter.
-Dave Haynie
Hotmail? Is that actually used for anything besides MSDN SSO credentials anymore?
You don't need Hotmail for LiveID (which is what MSDN uses) - any email will do, though you will have to wade through "are you sure you REALLY don't want Hotmail?" when you register it.
Aside from that, Hotmail is actually the world's largest email service by user count, at ~350 million. For comparison, GMail is ~200 million.
Servers and handhelds (mostly niche gimmicks, those - and pretty much abandoned) are not in any way about "they tend to always be behind Apple ... still somehow end up at the front". DOS and Windows falls into the same, one phenomena, IMHO.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Who said it was a positive?
That said, the extreme profit margin's not coming from users, as near as I can tell. The on-contract and SIM-free price of the iPhone is at a parity with smartphones from rival vendors. The advantage is either at the manufacturing end, or in the wholesale price they charge the networks.
ok, sorry if you didn't mean it as a positive, many here clearly do use Apple profit share that way - as soon as Android started passing them on unit numbers - which baffles me.
As for where profit it is coming from - compare prices of unsubsidized phones and you see the iPhones being quite expensive. This is a hidden cost when buying a subsidized plan - or more correctly it is a cost spread out over 2 years. But it is the users ending up paying. The phone is more expensive and the network is not giving away money for free.
They were examples of things Microsoft did that surpassed Apple. Handhelds weren't very niche in the enterprise... the Fortune 500 companies I worked for had tons of iPaq's. And Windows Mobile was never abandoned, they just lost marketshare when they rested on their laurels.
DOS != Windows. Same as the OS on Apple ][s != Mac OS and OSX.
Admittedly Microsoft was in front of Apple on servers, but we all know how that went for Apple.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
...which also is appropriate for Slashdot.
I can't think of a single BOGO sale for an iPhone. Ever. Not so for Android
This past December, Best Buy had a buy ZERO get one free sale on the iPhone 3GS, which I think beats a BOGO sale.
In most of the world palmtops were very ignored. And of course "DOS != Windows", that's not the point - the phenomenon was IMHO largely a continuity of early success / exploiting its ramifications.
One that hath name thou can not otter
I'm glad that Google and Android are doing very well. As a programmer I like the Android platform more than the iOS that iPhone/iPad offers; also, Apple's policy is kind of restrictive compared to Google's.