Smartphone Sales: Apple Squeezed, Blackberry Squashed, Android 81.3%

mrspoonsi writes "Engadget reports: Smartphone market share for the third quarter...as you'd imagine, the world is still Android's oyster. Strategy Analytics estimates that the OS has crossed the symbolic 80 percent mark, reaching 81.3 percent of smartphone shipments by the end of September. Not that Google was the only company doing well — Nokia's strong US sales helped Windows Phone grow to 4.1 percent of the market, or nearly double what it had a year ago."

Comments

Re:Apple made the same mistake

[Solandri]

Um, if you want define "mistake" as "making lots of money", then yeah, they made a "mistake". If you look at usage stats though what you see is a very different picture. For instance, iPhones still dominate in mobile web usage, as well as app usage etc.

No it doesn't. Those stats are for iOS (iPhone + iPad) vs Android phones and tablets. And it's only for wifi traffic. On web traffic over cellular networks, Android devices generate slightly more traffic than iOS devices. Basically your link cherry-picked the one chart favorable to iOS.

If you limit the comparison to just iPhone vs Android phones, Android generates more web traffic. And before you pull out the NetMarketShare data showing iPhone still leading: (1) NetMarketShare gets data from only a few tens of thousands of sites, while StatCounter gets its data from millions of sites. And (2) NetMarketShare's figures are normalized to unique visitors per month. i.e. Someone who visits a site once in a month counts as much as someone who uses the site every day. StatCounter counts web hits, so is measuring actual web usage rather than counting number of users. In other words, more iPhone users browse the web on their phone than Android users, but they don't do much browsing. The hardcore phone browser users are on Android and they generate more web traffic than the larger number of iPhone users who use the browser..

Basically the only lead Apple still has is the iPad in the tablet market, and it's rapidly losing that too. Their share of quarterly tablet sales dropped from a commanding 60% in 2012 to 33% in 2Q2013, and now 29% in 3Q2013. Those are quarterly sales, so iPads probably still comprise the majority of tablets in use, which match with your initial stats showing iOS dominating in wifi-based web traffic.

Re:Apple made the same mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

What on earth are you talking about? IBM didn't "open up" the PC design. Compaq reversed engineered it using a clean room process to avoid legal issues. (http://computemagazine.com/the-history-of-the-ibm-personal-computer/)

Re:“SOURCE: Strategy Analytics”

[fatphil]

They are in the same district of Seoul, but 1321-1 and 1320-10 are not just different buildings, they're not even the same block. Post codes aren't even the same 137-857 vs. 137-070.

Let's stick to facts - they are both in one of the most prestigious part of the capital city. Alas that's not really such a great conspiracy, is it?

Re:Apple made the same mistake

[Bert64]

And that reverse engineering process was significantly aided by the fact that all of the hardware was built using off the shelf components, and the only thing they actually had to reverse engineer was the BIOS.