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Android Hits 73% of Global Smartphone Market
eldavojohn writes "Gartner's released a report on worldwide numbers of 2012 3Q phone sales and the staggering results posted from Android have caused people like IW's Eric Zeman to call for sanity. Keep in mind these are worldwide numbers, which might be less surprising when you realize that the biggest growth market of them all is China, which is more than 90% Android. It's time to face the facts and realize that Android now owns 73% of the worldwide smartphone market. While developers bicker over which platform is best for development and earnings, the people of the world may be making the choice based on just how inexpensive an Android smartphone can be. This same time last year, Gartner reported Android at 52.5% of market share and it now sits at 72.4% market share with over 122 million units sold worldwide."
iPhone vs Android flamewar in 3, 2, ...
But BB10 is going to change everything!
Why would you care?
Do you care if the company that makes your other things profits?
I am at odds with these companies, I am trying to get the best price for the best goods. They are trying to get the most money.
Not surprising that free software is so popular. Especially when it's the greedy manufacturers doing the shopping ;)
Not only is the software free, but the maintenance and upgrades are being handled for them too. Unless you have a big company pushing you to install their OS on it (MS) this is probably going to be your best choice.
Looking back at the considerable difficulty that MS has getting Windows to run smoothly on a wide variety of hardware, it's impressive to see just how well Android manages to support such a large variety of kit. Kudos to them for that.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Eventually the market will be overwhelmed (if not already) by the number of Android phones. At some point the developers will stop and realize there's a whole lot of people in the other ecosystem.
Now hopefully they actually write an app that uses Android properly instead of some stupid iOS port - I've seen so many that are hard to use on Android because of this.
The big thing is that Android is going on cheaper phones - we just got a plain phone here at work with a keyboard for texting, it came with Android and it was a whopping $150 to buy outright. It's no wonder the shipments/sales have taken off.
Not everyone needs a $600 smartphone, and it's an oversight on Apple's part.
This is a total re-play of the IBM/Apple race for PC market. Google is the IBM in this scenario. Next logical prediction would be Apple is going into crisis in a few years and looks for a new Steve Jobs to come up with something new entirely for which another competitor will play the IBM card.
I think that speaks more to how overpriced Apple products are. How do you think that they have $100 billion in cash?
Not really. I think it speaks to the nature of the market Apple sells into. The iPhone is similarly priced to phones like the Galaxy SIII and other top tier Android handsets, but the 73% of global marketshare is certainly not all phones of the SIII's calibre - there are going to be a lot of much cheaper phones in there (Samsung itself sells a cheaper baby brother version of the S-class).
Apple makes the bulk of the cash because it focuses on a small slice of the market, with a highly tuned product (ie, with few options) and in certain markets (such as the US) accounts for 40% or more of the market with that small line.
They have $100 billion in cash because they've been sitting on it it for some time not paying dividends (although they do now), and having multiple highly profitable product lines since the launch of the original iMac.
The fact remains, that the iPhone costs almost the same as a top Android handset. It costs *a lot* more than the average Android handset price though... but so does the SIII.
Android comes in so many different varieties. I need a slideout keyboard - no problem, lots of choices. iPhone? Forget about it - one size is supposed to fit all. Need a stylus? Nope. Need a bigger screen? Nope. Smaller screen? Nope. Multiple physical keys? Nope. Add a Micro SD card? Nope. NFC? Nope. FM radio chip? Nope. No choice = smaller sales.
It might turn out to be like computers. Apple does not have a large marketshare of computers compared to Dell or HP; however, they are highly profitable even though they have lower sales.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Not everyone needs a $600 smartphone, and it's an oversight on Apple's part.
Not an oversight. They chose to give up on that 47%. They will never buy Apple stuff anyway.
wait till the Lumia 1120 gets released in 2017 - THAT will be the game-changer.
The fact remains, that the iPhone costs almost the same as a top Android handset. It costs *a lot* more than the average Android handset price though... but so does the SIII.
Well, like any market with high end offerings and low end offerings, the high end is making up for the thin margins at the low end. If Generic Android Handset Free with 2 Year Contract wasn't sold at cost to the cell providers, there would be no need to inflate the price on the high end to cover development.
Apple doesn't really make a low end anything. Even the iPod Shuffle and Mac Mini are not positioned as competition against commodity mp3 players and cheap PCs.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Apple didn't lose half their share. The market's absolute size increased, with Android being the main player in that growth, thus Apple's part of the pie shrank even if in absolute numbers it didn't.
Also, if I'm not mistaken those are market share statistics and not sales statistics. Market share won't be quite as affected by the pre-upgrade slump, because an important proportion of iPhone 5 buyers are iPhone owners.
As a developer, I have to say that I develop for iOS first. There are many reasons for this (I actually like Android better for personal use).
The fragmentation of the Android platform is ridiculous. Not only do you have to worry about processors, screen ratio, resolution and anything else hardware related... you also have to worry about fragmentation of the operating system. Some people might have gingerbread and haven't upgraded to ice cream sandwich yet. And perhaps their phone can't handle the newest version. On top of that users may not have enough technical knowledge to fix it.
This results in consumers blaming your product. It doesn't work on their phone, this app sucks, the company sucks, etc.
However, releasing on iOS... you only have to worry about a couple of configurations of phone (you can even stipulate that your app only works on 3GS or 4 and above or whatever) and a few different screen ratios/resolutions. It's even okay to force the user to upgrade to the latest version of iOS. Which is simple to do.
This results in people (hopefully) enjoying your app and getting your company and products a fan base. Then when you port it to Android... if the app doesn't work on their phone and they do a search they'll find good reviews, testimonials, etc and blame their phone instead of the developer.
...Windows on the smartphone.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The problem is artificially confining yourself to (what could wind up being) only 5-10% of the marketplace doesn't seem to be wise for the long run. Look at Apple's history.
They'll have to come out with a new iPhone every three months to keep their profits up.
Thread.sleep()
Reminds me of one of my favorite stories: The Speed-up Loop.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Maybe because you want the company, and the android ecosystem as a whole, to thrive?
Actually, since there is more than one Android phone maker, I don't care that much about wether one of them thrives, as long as the ecosystem Android does.
So far all of my smartphones have been made by HTC.
Now, HTC doesn't look very healthy right now.
Still, I care about using an Android phone more than about that phone being made by HTC, so while I hope HTC recovers, it wouldn't hurt me that much if they don't.
That's one of the advantages of an ecosystem vs. a monoculture.
Walmart profits on necessity spending. How many cell phone apps fall into that category?
Google Maps for the new iPhone comes to mind.
Actually, a 64GB iP5 is about twice as expensive as a 64GB GS3, thanks the SD cards' lower price. There's a wide gap at 32GB too.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
The Android market is split in 2: the flagship market and the budget market. There is very limited choice on the flagship market. The budget market comes however in all shapes, form, price point, but brand support is unpredictable. You can get a phone that will be supported for years, and another that will be forgotten after a few months.
The high end market in which Apple compete was mostly unoriginal and expensive. I said "was" because Google just crashed the party with the Nexus 4, a high end phone from a reputable brand at very competitive price. That will be interesting to see how Apple, but also HTC, Sony, Samsung, LG will manage to justify a 100% premium. Worst case scenario, they will just align the price. Personally I hope they will innovate. Since the original iPhone in 2007, there hasn't been much innovation (larger, faster, thinner, widget on the lock screen, ... are improvements, very important that you could not live without and some that required great engineering innovation, but since the original iPhone nothing has created the same wow factor )
I would if most of those were at a current OS version. Hell even 4.0... but 90% are still at nothing higher than 2.3.5 and that is utter crap.
I love my Nexus, but I feel really bad for peopel that bought a phone from a crap maker that will not push out updates in a timely manner.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I've been writing mobile apps for about three years now and a lot depends on your target market. If you are creating a paid apps and a small shop then you want to go iOS first. The first two apps I did had a free version with ads and a paid version with no ads and additional features (basically version 2.0). I had more downloads on Android of the free version by about 2.5 to 1 vs iOS. But iOS made up 90% of my paid revenue. While Android provided 70% of the ad revenue at first it suddenly leveled off and began to decline. I ignored it until one app got a bad review saying the software had malware and then found 3 more knock off apps all of which were spelled similar to mine and of suspect origin. Now these were niche apps with a few thousand paid downloads each on iOS. I originally built the apps to serve some need I was looking for and thought it might be worth $.99 to others. They were enough that it was a profitable hobby/moonlighting gig. Nothing that sold a million copies or anything like that.
Ironically I did release a couple of those apps for Amazon Kindle Fire, which is technically android, and made more money from the Kindle this year than I ever did generic android on the Google Marketplace. The app I'm working on today I'm going to release for iOS and the Kindle. I'm probably going to ignore Google Marketplace for now for my moonlighting apps.
And that's a problem I've found with Android and the same problem I had with linux about 10 - 15 years ago as in there are many different "flavors" of android. I use that term a little more loosely than with linux, but there are minor inconstancies from the different manufactures mostly having to do with hardware vs. the location of library files that made linux such a PITA back then. I know there will be fan boys screaming, "But if you design your app right it will run on anything." at which point I figure these people have never dealt with clients who are marketing departments. On the paid app development side of the house we offer this thing called Quality Assurance as part of the contract. I know people can laugh about it as much as they want to, but it's there and some clients are looking for pixel perfect (don't worry we charge them for it). First year we tried to keep up with android and lost our shirt buying hardware for testing. Now it's "Will work on stock android for latest nexus phone & tablet".
That's generally why when my shop charges for development it's $X for all iOS devices, $X * ($X*.15) for Kindle, and $X+($X*.75) for android, and then we charge anywhere from $1000 - $3500 per additional android device for QA.
But the biggest annoyance I had with android on the personal projects was the fact of having to maintain different build branches for different Android versions vs 1 build branch for iOS no matter what iDevice(s) the end product would be shipping for. That's started to change now, but at one time if you "supported Android" that meant making sure it worked on 1.5, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, and 3.0 as all were in the wild. I know that's far less today as Android's release schedule has grown a little more sane than the every six months with a new release that was going on a couple years ago.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Oh my hell, you Apple fanbois are in so much denial. It's because of China? Really?
Don't forget to mention some totally irrelevent fact like "Oh yeah, but most of those phones aren't running the latest version althoughactuallyios6ononeiphoneisntthesameasios6onanother!" or "Well I'm a developer and iOS makes me so much more money I stopped even bothering to support Android a few years ago andhavenoideawhatthesituationwouldbeifididsupportitnow."
Here's the deal: Android is leading the way making smartphones available to everyone. Proper smartphones. Y'know, that conform to the original definition before Jobs changed it to "A phone with a PDA built-in that the manufacturer has complete control over."
I think that's fantastic. I have issues with modern smartphones, not least the stupid battery lives, but I think it's great that such a fantasticly useful tool is in the hands of almost everyone these days. That's worth celebrating. If you happen to like some rival to Android, and the figures don't seem to suggest that they're the ones putting smartphones in people's hands, take it up with them. Stop dissing the one group that's got it right.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I think it's pretty damn cool.
I mean, that the mainstream avg person sees linux as the OS for nerdy, contrarian, anti-establishment type peoples (ie, Linux) and it now become itself mainstream in that it basically runs the cell phone world (yes i know linux servers have runt he net for years...but thats not mainstream)
And then it gets even cooler when you consider that iOS, still with the same familiar looks Apple has long been known for, is derived from Unix (via OSX).
Flamewar? Bah. Just a bit of sibling rivalry as they curb stomp Windows into oblivion in the largest/quickest growing platform market.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
but 90% are still at nothing higher than 2.3.5
Actually, Gingerbread and below are down to about 70%. Not good (JB is only on an utterly pitiful number of devices), but improving slowly.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
You need to actually use a galaxy S3 before calling Samsung a copy cat. The machine they give you is so far ahead of the iPhone its unbelievable! I have had all of the iPhones except the 5 and I can tell you that the actual functionality of the S3 is at least six years ahead. The only thing the iPhone does better than Android on the S3 is sync with iTunes on a Mac. Fortunately I donneed to sync with iTunes any more. Im starting to wish Id bought an Android tablet now even though I still like my iPad.
I do think the iPhone looks nice though,
You have just said that Apple and the S3 are of a similar price and that Apple make a lot more money. It seems to me that would suggest that Apple are giving you much less for the same price.
I think that is true.
The usages of my Samsung Note 2 are:
Play music: 70%
Play video games while in the bus, train etc: 10%
Record videos of my little daughter to share with relatives: 5%
Google chat and SMS: 5%
Read personal mail at work: 5%
Phone calls are somewhere in the remaining 5%
Oh, and while on holidays it's invaluable to have a GPS navigation device that allows you to click right through to the website of the hotel you found on the overlaid map and yes, call them to reserve a room for the night.
And the GPS + satellite photo maps have saved me from getting badly lost in a forest at least once, and kept me from being late while taking a picturesque route to a rendez-vous another time. Maps-on-demand that include your location are a god-given when you're traveling, hiking, etc.
Try any that with a brick phone.
"I'm still trying to figure out what else would be worth paying hundreds of dollars more for a bigger phone with a shorter battery life."
Navigation, POI (business search), and live traffic information is worth vastly more than $100 by itself.
Listening to your entire music collection and/or live streaming like Pandora and PRI/NPR/BBC World.
Watching youtube videos, or entire DVDs if you are so inclined (works out well on long flights).
Reading and replying to your personal and work email wherever and whenever you feel like it.
Having both your personal appointments and reminders, and your work appointments pulled from Exchange automatically.
Using a good RSS reader, allowing you to read the articles from a number of website you frequent (including /.) all in a slick interface, at a moment's notice, without needing to turn on/off a computer.
Replying to idiots on /. at work...
Having all your ebooks wherever you are, and a great screen to read them on.
Having a great SSH client wherver you are, so you can login to your Linux boxes and do... absoloutely anything and everything...
Scientific calculator with you at all times.
All the games you can stand... From strategy games to word games, to emulators allowing you to play any game for older consoles (Genesis, N64, etc).
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Well of course you are right in nearly everything you have said :)
However, I would vigorously dispute your last sentence. I have an iPhone sitting here right next to my S3. Putting them side by side, there are only two things that strike me as being "pros" for the iPhone. 1) It looks nice. 2) It syncs better with Itunes on a Mac. Other than that, I really struggle to think of anything that is not considerably better on the S3. I have 3 Macs, I have two iPads and all the iPhones except 5 so Im not exactly an Apple hater but this S3 has rather opened my eyes to what the rest of the world has been doing while Ive been playing with my iPhone all these years,
It is a measure of how far ahead it is. I would have said ten years but that would have been silly :)
Regardless of the actual time scales involved, IOS has not really moved since it came out (nearly six years ago by the way). On IOS I have eagerly seen the introduction of cut and paste, folders, the notification bar that doesnt really do much, the ability to swap application by double pressing the home button and wading through all the apps that never closed, and tiny little changes that made minor though sometimes pleasing differences to the way it worked. Then Apple invested all their IOS resources into Siri which is almost useless outside the US (unlike both Googles and Samsungs offerings) and, of course, maps (which they already had). Jumping from IOS to Android on the S3 was like going through a hundred of Apples major updates in one go and I still keep finding little touches that surprise me that Apple hadnt thought of them first, let alone at all.
I have lots of Apple products and I like them in the main, I wont upgrade my iPad to IOS 6.0 as it has nothing I want and takes away something I do but I doubt I will ever go back to one of their phones.
By the way, having a low UID on Slashdot is easy. You just have to be a bit of an old twit.