Android Will Surpass Windows By 2016, Say Gartner Stats

An anonymous reader writes "Google's Android operating system will be used on more computing devices than Microsoft's Windows within four years, data from research firm Gartner showed on Wednesday, underlining the massive shift in the technology sector. At the end of 2016, there will be 2.3 billion computers, tablets and smartphones using Android software, compared with 2.28 billion Windows devices, Gartner data showed." The comparison would make less sense if Android was strictly for phones, and Windows was strictly for desktops-with-keyboards, but gets interesting as the devices on which each system runs overlap ever more.

Comments

Re:First

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course that means further demise of the desktop.

I'll stand on the sidewalk and wave as the desktop heads outta town, providing the apps I need work reasonably on tablets.

And what happens when they don't, and then tablets move in and start shitting on your kitchen counter and demanding you fork more money into them every year because last year's model isn't supported anymore, while your desktop chugged along happily for years on end?

That's an awfully big "provided" clause you've got there. But, provided Jesus comes back and everyone gets candy and happiness in solid, tangible form, all wars and conflicts end, and we all live in permanent euphoria forever and ever, I guess that'll be all right!

Hence Windows 8

[fm6]

This is why 8 is so absurdly tablet-centric. If people are buying tablets instead of PCs, well, you can retain them as customers by shoehorning your PC OS into the new paradigm.

What this strategy misses is the fact that people are not replacing their PCs with tablets. They still use PCs, but they don't upgrade them very often. So Windows doesn't have any special advantage as a tablet OS, and is unlikely to rival Android or iOS.

Re:x86 port

[JDG1980]

I would wager that Android on the desktop would suffer from the same problems that other distributions suffer from.. drivers for one. All Android would be is a distro that updates infrequently and has an integrated app store.

The app store is a really big deal... one of the major reasons people don't use desktop Linux is the fact that it doesn't run many of the programs they want to use. There are probably more apps for Android by now than for desktop Linux, and certainly more apps that the average person would be interested in using.

Drivers are a chicken-and-egg problem... a lot of vendors don't bother with drivers for Linux because it's a small market, and it remains a small market in part because driver support sucks. But Android, by solving some of the other barriers to Linux-kernel adoption, could help break that logjam.

Please make it so

[Sloppy]

The issue with Android making the jump to the desktop hinges around one issue: User support. Android uses UIDs to separate apps. How would it keep users separate, which is a must on a desktop box.
 
The only way I can see that happening would be a hypervisor based system with each user on their own VM, and the core filesystem everything sits on having deduplication built in (so each user's environment only saves what the user's changes are.) Then, have a system where users have one mounted filesystem for sharing between everything.

Forget desktops; even for single-user mobile devices, what you're describing sounds like an excellent idea anyway. "Excellent" maybe even understates it; I'd say something like this is necessary for phones to ever stop sucking.

It'd useful not just so that different users could use different VMs, but also to optionally hide one user's applications from one another. Something refuses to install unless I give it access to my address book? Ok, here, have .. um.. an address book.