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Feature Phones Make Java ME, Not Android, the #2 Mobile Internet OS
bonch writes "According to a report from NetApplications, which has measured browser usage data since 2004, Oracle's Java Mobile Edition has surpassed Android as the #2 mobile OS on the internet at 26.80%, with iOS at 46.57% and Android at 13.44%. And the trend appears to be growing. Java ME powers hundreds of millions of low-end 'feature phones' for budget buyers. In 2011, feature phones made up 60% of the install base in the U.S." Looking at the linked chart, it looks Java ME's been ahead of Android for all of 2011, too, except for the month of October.
I wonder how much Christmas played into those little bumps. It's almost like people head off buying expensive new phones during that period, possibly in hopes in getting them for gifts. Possibly to afford more gifts. Would have been nice to see back one more year. Because otherwise looks like JavaME is steadily losing share, but had a bump the last two months.
Duh, since when was Java ME an OS?
I have access to a great deal of actual and current mobile usage data, and this is just completely at odds with reality. "Feature phone" owners in the United States typically do not have data plans and do not use the Internet.
Actual measured usage of mobile Web services by "feature phones" is slightly above that of Windows Mobile, which is to say "irrelevant noise at the bottom of the chart" in the range of 1 to 2 percent.
Grandpa's Jitterbug may in fact run J2ME, but Grandpa doesn't use it.
J2ME is not an OS. It's a runtime environment that runs on top of an OS (like Blackberry OS), just like normal Java.
End of line..
The upturn for java ME is matched by a drop in iOs, with adroid being rather flat.
The fact of J2ME being widely available, is quite distinct from the issue of it being widely targeted. I can think of several reasons for why J2ME is irrelevant.
1. Feature phones aren't really suitable for sophisticated apps. Most power users have already migrated to the next gen touch phones (Android, IOS) or at the very least, Symbian. Those who stick on with feature phones probably don't use custom apps in the first place.
2. There is no proper marketplace for apps comparable to Android or Apple. This makes it difficult for the average user to obtain new apps, even if he/she were to actually want to use an app on their feature phone (which they probably don't).
3. Ultimately, the J2ME support may be relevant only to the phone manufacturer, in order to provide some bundled apps, like a calculator or something. Without a market place and given the hurdles (lack of user interest, severe incapability of phones) there's little incentive for developers to program for it.
Therefore, why would J2ME's wide availability be relevant?
There are more Android PHONES than iOS PHONES, that is true. When you factor in the iPad and iPod Touch that swings way around in favor of Apple. Hence Mobile Devices
Android may have the highest market-share, but what the Article -- and several others done that have rather consistently said the same thing -- is that despite being #1 in number of phones, it has trailed significantly behind iOS in actual web browsing.
For whatever reason, though less people buy an iPhone, a significantly higher margin actually use their iOS device on the web. It is the #1 mobile platform for web browsing. Perhaps because iOS is more then iPhone by a large margin, but Android people tend to hate it when the iPod Touch or iPad are brought up and conflated with the iPhone (even though Apple people tend to view iPhone + iPad + iPod Touch as a single platform). Perhaps its just that iPhone users do use the web more. I have no idea.
But this is not at all an isolated report in that regard. Even Google has stated that about two thirds of their mobile ad revenue comes from the iPhone.
The J2ME thing is weird though and its the first time I've heard of it showing up at all in the top lists, so I dunno what's different about this report then others.
Then Google screwed itself by not initially allowing Android Market on devices with no 3G radio, in effect giving the whole market to Apple.
There are several problems with the article, but this ain't one. You're looking at two different statistics. The first is based on web use, the second on market share. So if iPhones represent 20% of the market, but people who use them spend 75% more time on the web, then the discrepancy is explained. What this really means is that people who own iPhones spend more time on the Internet using their phones. I'm still confused about the numbers though. I can see why feature phones are so high; not many people use them much on the Internet, but there are a huge number of them.
It seems strange that Android usage is so far below iOS usage though. Market shares are close (depending on who's numbers you believe), and I can't imagine that iOS owners use the Internet three times as much as Android owners.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
This is not about installations, this is about web site views. In fact this is the most important data reliably available to use when determining smart phone market share. It's not quite as good as App installs, but those numbers are manipulated by the various manufacturers so can't be trusted. The reason is that what makes a phone a "smartphone" isn't really a device, it's the user's attitude to that device. If the user buys an iPhone and uses it for just phone calls, they may get the boyfriends, but that they aren't making app store purchases and they aren't influencing how people should build web apps.
If you were right, then this is in some sense a disaster for Android because it shows that people who have Android don't actually use it nearly as much as they use iOS. You aren't entirely right however, since the Android installed base is still smaller than iOS; Android is selling more right now but hasn't yet caught up with iOS. I believe Android is just below 200 million and iOS is decisively over 200 million. Furthermore, older Android devices have much worse usability than the newest ones, so it will be a year or so until the installed base of usable Android devices overtakes the installed base of iOS.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
The graph is crap. Note the lack of any explanation of methodology -- or even a clear explanation what's actually being measured.
Actual measured usage of the Web by mobile devices (i.e., phones and not including tablets) puts Android collectively slightly ahead of the iPhone. Rim has fallen to about 4-5% and everybody else is not worth talking about. The reason Blackberry scores so low is that most Blackberry devices suck at Web browsing. They're still very good email tools and that's what they're used for in corporate settings.
If you include tablets -- which typically are used in lieu of laptops or desktops -- then iOS takes about 60 percent and Android between 30 and 35 on the mainstream, non-geek sites that I measure.
As for the heaviest users of smartphones -- it's not geeks, but rather teenage girls. They're spending most of their time in the Facebook app and not even showing up as Web users.
This is why I brought up the point that Android's going to catch up to iOS Six Months From Now.
People are buying Android but they're simply just not using Android devices like iOS users are. this is a problem with carriers, phone hardware vendors AND Google. People are buying these phones and just not giving a damn. OTOH, iOS users are actually engaging with their devices. This is poison for Android as an ecosystem.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
And this is why i cringe whenever i read a article on mobile tech from a US tech site (and lets face it, most english language tech new is US centric. And the non-english often just translate the english stuff). The US mobile phone market is so ass backwards that it can only really be compared to Japan, if one limits ones view to places that at least try to appear democratic.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
yes. you just have to get the .jar sent to the phone somehow or make the phone to download the .jar .jar there. if you want it to load as signed, to allow for more lax security rules(in actual reality though signing j2me apps is useless, you don't gain much benefits from buying a cert and signing. I know, I tried - what you'd need would be carriers/manufacturers sign. and different for everything. but why does it matter? well, ftp client is no fucking fun at all if you have to press allow 3 times per file saved to filesystem outside of the j2me sandbox! and most phones don't have "allow always" option without carrier or manufacturer signing it into their security domain). anyhow I'm rambling, what I meant to say is that if you want signing, you need to have the .jad there as well(the actual standard I think wants both .jad and .jar always, you know, the application could check where it got the .jad and see if there were updates to it and so on, but almost all phones on the market just want the .jar, it's got all the relevant info anyways and none of them have auto updating anyways and none of the big j2me distribution channels were suited for that anyways..).
a standard simple way is to make put them on a web server that has the right mime types and then point the phones browser to the
here, have a free asteroids clone(parallax scrolling background and shitniz) http://jussin.net/~glass/klash.jar .
works on anything from s40 2nd edition upwards, motos from razrs etc up. you know what's funny? this is the second mobile phone program I wrote but it still runs on phones you can actually buy! j2me is wonderful in that aspect, a huge back-library of programs available, many for free. too bad android just doesn't ship with a j2me vm..
btw loading from web works usually with even old-ass carrier branded motorolas, even if they're of the variety where local sideloading of j2me apps was disabled.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
well, they screw up the stats, of course.
if you're tired of m. sites, you'd click your opera to report itself as a desktop browser anyways.
it's quite possible they're only gathering stats which include the phone model on the headers - and only those which they happened to buy from some db they chose.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
There is basically no common API, compatibility with different versions is totally unpredictable, and the development tools are across the board awful. JavaME is crap and it should be ignored and forgotten.
What about pay as you go phones?
The affordable pay as you go plans tend to be available only for feature phones. For example, Virgin Mobile USA's "payLo" plans starting at $7/mo appear available only for feature phones, and Android phones have to use a $35/mo "Beyond Talk" plan that has as many voice minutes in a month as I'll use in a year.
Everyone I know speaks English, and I can count on one hand the number of people I personally know who speak Mandarin, so therefore I believe that the number of people who speak it compared to English is very low.
Any stats using actual data are completely fictional! My anecdotal evidence is totally representative!
Verizon and Sprint don't use GSM family protocols; instead, they use CDMA2000. Worse yet, they program the subscriber identity directly into the handset instead of using removable CSIM cards because unlike in GSM, a removable CSIM is optional in CDMA2000. So the only phones that work on Verizon's network are Verizon phones, and the only phones that work on Sprint's network are Sprint phones.
And the answer is "Where it says it's about measured browser usage data in the first line of the summary".
Or if you actually read the article (yeah. right - you couldn't even read the first line of the summary), click on any of the links in the table and select by browser.
Heh... If it were using Linus' version of Linux, you'd be able to take the application userland via AOSS and run non-NDK applications with a minimum amount of jiggery-pokery on the desktop.
You. Can't.
And it's not because of just their insistence on the graphics being "non-standard". Android's Linux kernel has additional mods that have yet to be merged back in. So, it's an Android specific fork of the Linux kernel combined with an Android app framework in an Android specific userland (it's different than pretty much any Linux distribution's layout or buildup...)- so while you can make a Linux app work under Android, it doesn't lead that it's just simply Linux with the Android app framework slapped on top of it.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I bought an Archos 43 Internet Tablet a year ago
Samsung has a direct Android competitor to iTouch.
A year ago, there was no Galaxy Player. The Galaxy Player didn't come out until the fourth quarter of 2011, which gave the second-generation iPod touch a three-year head start among pocket-size tablets with access to the platform's largest app store.
The US mobile phone market is so ass backwards that it can only really be compared to Japan, if one limits ones view to places that at least try to appear democratic.
No, you can compare it to Canada's mobile phone market quite favourably.
Canada: making the US cell phone system look reasonable since 1985.
Yaz
Android people tend to hate it when the iPod Touch or iPad are brought up and conflated with the iPhone (even though Apple people tend to view iPhone + iPad + iPod Touch as a single platform).
I'm not sure I'm an "Android person," but the reason I dislike it when it's brought up is because it doesn't matter all that much and it's more of a distraction.
Take Q3 2011 as an example. According to Gartner, there were 60 million Android phones shipped and 17 million iPhones shipped. "But this doesn't include iPod touches and iPads!" you shriek. Fair enough--let's include them.
According to Apple, they shipped 11 million iPads and 6.62 million iPods. Now let's assume, just for laughs, that all of those were iPod touches. That's right, Apple didn't sell a single iPod shuffle or iPod nano. That ups Apple's iOS sales to 35 million--more than double the iPhone reference. But it's still a little more than half the Android phone sales. And that's making a pretty big assumption about iPod touch sales.
Let's try to figure out Android tablet sales. According to IDC, Apple had about 61% of the market with 11 million iPads. Android had about 32%. Doing a little math, that means about 6 million Android tablets. So we have 66 million Android phone and tablet sales versus 28 million iPhone & iPad sales.
That's what I mean by a "distraction." They just use this to try to discredit the original report.
but it's a system that operates the computer right? I mean regardless of where the pieces came from it's an entire system, correct?
True. But that wasn't the question; and answering the question really does depend on the view of an operating system:
In the first, the answer depends on further information.
In the second, only the Linux Kernel would be considered the operating system; everything else (glibc, etc.) would be the user environment.
In the third, whatever comes on the computer out-of-the-box is the operating system.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Please allow me to rephrase: "More phones are capable of running MIDlets than APKs."
Sure. But is there a functioning *market* for midlets? One that will bring a pack of uniformly targetable customers to developers and a selection of apps for users? Or is it divided up by handset manufacturer and implementation?
I followed Java ME for a decade; it was promising, but it was never one platform that could bring users and developers together because it was controlled by so many different middle men. It was the handset makers' role to provide an implementation, and they catered to the carriers, not users or developers. Consequently there could never have been anything like a J2ME app store because no two implementations were the same. Intentionally or not, that's just the way the carriers wanted it. They don't *want* customers using generic Internet services, they want them tied to proprietary services like "picture mail" or music stores. It took the strength of Apple on one hand, and the weakness of AT&T on the other, to break the inertia.
I haven't followed Java ME since Android came out on real hardware, so maybe things have changed, but when I *was* following it, it made no sense at all to add up all the J2ME phones because so many of the implementations had proprietary extensions, and there was never a robust common minimum user experience guaranteed across all the myriad handsets J2ME was installed upon. This meant there was never a unified market for buying and selling apps. That was the feudal era of mobile app development.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
For whatever reason, though less people buy an iPhone, a significantly higher margin actually use their iOS device on the web. It is the #1 mobile platform for web browsing.
Probably because the iPhone is only available with data plans. You can buy an Android phone without data or on PAYG, in which case you probably won't be doing much browsing from it. That is always "problem" for Android when it comes to stats - since it covered the low spec and low cost end of the market as well as the high end comparing it to iOS is difficult. I put "problem" in quotes because it is of course one of Android's biggest strengths.
It is the only reasonable explanation since the Android browser is at last as good as the iOS one up to 2.x (I actually prefer the way it lays out text for ease of reading on a mobile screen rather than relying on zooming so much), and from 3.x onwards it is significantly better. Plus many Android tablets give you a better browsing experience by having a 1280 pixel wide screen compared to the iPad's 1024 pixel wide one. In other words there is no usability reason why it should be used less.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC