Slashdot Mirror
Android Passes BlackBerry In US Market Share
An anonymous reader writes "69.5 million people in the US owned smartphones during the three months ending in February 2011, up 13 percent from the preceding three-month period. For the first time, more Americans are using phones running Google's Android operating system than Research In Motion's BlackBerry, according to comScore. Having passed the iPhone in the preceding three-month period, this now means that Android has been crowned king in the US."
This is all just a rehash of the PC industry during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Back then, Apple had their proprietary hardware and software stack, and it did achieve a relatively high level of popularity, at least initially. There were other smaller players, like Amiga, Commodore and Tandy back then, and RIM and Nokia today, who offered their own platforms.
Android is best compared to MS-DOS, oddly enough. It was about being a flexible OS that ran on a wide range of hardware from a wide range of vendors, and in many ways it maximized the freedom of developers and users alike. It did very little to dictate how programs could be implemented, who may use them, and how they may be distributed.
We all know what happened. The most open of the platforms prevailed, and the rest were basically crushed into obscurity. Most went completely out of business. Apple, by far the strongest of them, only barely managed to survive the rest of the 1980s and early 1990s.
I suspect that the same thing might be happening today. Although not the first, Apple took a commanding lead within the market. But facing competition from more open hardware and software, they don't have a hope in hell of surviving in the long run. It remains to be seen what will happen with Jobs in the near future, but if he departs from Apple for whatever reason, it's likely that they'll face yet another dark period like that between 1987 and 1999.
The reason why Blackberry is losing marketshare is because Android is taking over Blackberry's non-key markets. A lot of people used to have Blackberries because they were the cheapest smartphone you could get. If you were with Sprint or Verizon and didn't want to get a Windows Mobile smartphone, BlackBerry was your only option until Android really took over. And even on T-Mobile and AT&T, a Blackberry cost a lot less than a G1 or iPhone.
Really, RIM made Blackberries for people who use their enterprise system, and for corporate people who check their e-mail every 5 seconds, and not as the general purpose smartphones that Android and iOS devices are. So when Android started gaining marketshare, it made sense for the people who simply got a Blackberry because it was cheap and had a Facebook app and a browser to migrate to Android.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I think it might be better to consider that The Apple app market saw over 17x the sales of the Android Market last year.....
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20032012-37.html
I saw it personally with a couple small apps I built and released for iPhone and Android. Despite more downloads of the free version on androids, over 85% of my sales were for iPhone. Given the time tweaking for the different versions of Android vs iOS, the apps I'm building this year are all for the iPhone.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.