Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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

Posted by samzenpus on from the leader-of-the-pack dept.

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."

9 of 390 comments (clear)

  1. Apple made the same mistake by etash · · Score: 5, Interesting

    with smartphones as in the 80s with the computers. It followed a practice of a closed ecosystem, keeping everything proprietary and trying to control everything. Android today is what IBM and compatible was back in the day. The same way apple computers became just a niche market back then, iphones are becoming right now.

    1. Re:Apple made the same mistake by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I don't think the closed ecosystem has anything to do with it : i have an iPhone, and while my teenage kids love it and wouldn't stop dreaming about one, they just CAN NOT AFFORD it. So they jumped ship and bought a cheap 150€ android. While their phone is inferior, it is "good enough" for all they need to do. Now that they bought it, they're stuck in the android world partly because of the apps they bought, partly due to pride in defending their choice, but mostly because they see that their cheap phone can do EVERYTHING my iPhone can do at a quarter of the price.

      apple is losing the youth, and doesn't give a shit.

    2. Re:Apple made the same mistake by antifoidulus · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      Apple is actually selling more iPhones than ever, even if their market share is falling. A big portion of the Android increase is coming in the form of people replacing "dumb" phones with smart phones, but as the usage stats show, many of them are still treating them like dumb phones. Apple has carved out a niche, and seems to be doing quite well in that niche without the need to sell an iPhone to every single user on the planet(which given their business model won't necessarily make them more money).

      Apple's situation now is not really comparable to the situation in the 80s. Maybe when large #s of devs start jumping ship, but you will still be hard pressed to find a large # of apps(note the pedants, I didn't say 0) that are available for Android but not iPhone.

      --
      Monstar L
    3. Re:Apple made the same mistake by greentshirt · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Apple only became the profitable monster it is today after coming back from the brink of extinction and dominating mobile / music. That's the source of it's "making lots of money."

      However, once it loses mobile, as it is surely poised to do, it will no longer be making lots of money... at least, not by current standards. Unless they figure out how to resurrect Jobs so he can resurrect the company again.

      Companies like Apple and Blackberry need to learn that no matter how dominantly they control a market, they are only a few quarterly cycles away from completely losing their market position.

    4. Re:Apple made the same mistake by AmiMoJo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Actually no, your iPhone 4 doesn't do 1080p. It scales its SD screen up to 1080p, except for video which can be higher resolution. Even then it isn't really 1080p because the image is heavily compressed. The HDMI adapter cable is basically an AirPlay receiver, and the image quality is awful.

      Personally, I see NFC as just another attack vector and would never use it.

      But wifi, the mobile network, Bluetooth, BTLE, SMS and the Lightning connector are all fine.

      Better camera is subjective. Does it take better pictures or just bigger pictures?

      Better. Aside from anything else it has optical image stabilization.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  2. “SOURCE: Strategy Analytics” by Udo+Schmitz · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Strategy Analytics is the company Samsung uses to push the numbers they like to the press, while at the same time avoiding any regulatory oversight. Strategy Analytics‘ Korean headquarter even is in the same building as Samsungs.

  3. Niche market by Udo+Schmitz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    [] apple computers became just a niche market back then, iphones are becoming right now. []

    Both are/will be very profitable niche markets though:

    http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/10/30/apple-earned-more-than-samsung-lg-nokia-huawei-lenovo-motorolas-mobile-shipments-combined

    And regarding Androids ubiquity, fragmentation or open-source-ness, this article suggests Google wants more control:

    http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-android-controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary/

  4. Ahh, another no-name two-bit "analytics" firm! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Ahh, another no-name two-bit "analytics" firm! It's really hard to pry numbers out of anybody but Apple regarding the number of phones that are in the hands of actual consumers. Google likes to pussyfoot around with "activations" and Samsung will tell you how many they loaded into shipping crates, but nobody actually thinks they are purposefully this obscure regarding their phone numbers for no reason. And let's not even talk about Microsoft's dishonesty regarding their sales numbers.

    These analytics firms all have serious issues, as well. They may pay a developer peanuts to throw their shitware / bloatware into a free game (or even a paid app, yikes!) and they might be able to get some of the more idiotic "home page" type setups like Gawker to put their scripts up, but they only ever manage to sample a small, small number of the actual smartphone users out there.

    The most reliable numbers come from the Wikipedia, a resource used by most everybody. The Wikimedia Traffic Analysis Report obviates the need for shitty poo-butt bloatware "analytics" firms whose job it is to obscure an already obscure statistic, and the numbers for smartphones in September 2013 break down thusly:

    Total Mobile: 29.5%, all Apple mobile OS versions: 18.1%, all Android versions: 8.47%, all Blackberry: 0.47%, all Windows Mobile: 0.33%.

    Since we're only dealing with 29.5% of the total traffic to Wikimedia-related sites in the mobile category, a burst of quick math will tell us what percentage of all mobile devices are running which OS's. 61.78% of the mobile devices are Apple devices, 28.62% are Androids of ANY MAKE, 1.59% are Blackberries, and a whopping 1.11% are Windows Mobiles. This only totals to 93.1%, the rest being a bunch of other amalgamated nonsense brands like Sony or Symbian and "Linux Other" aka Nokia.

    Quite a different story than the fuckin' crapware two-bit "analytics" firm's tale.

    "But WAIT, RocketRabbit," you say, "We're talking third quarter here!" And to that I laugh, a big hearty har har har, as you are such a fuckin' twit that you don't realize that most of the companies out there are either flat-out lying about their numbers, aren't telling, or are going by some bullshit made-up statistic like Google's shady "activations." Oh, I know the numbers guys at lame ass investment firms need these percentages to justify quarterbacking loser companies for the next quarter, but they live in their own little fantasy world and real life facts are not important to their economic calculations.

    So what's all this tell you? You're an idiot of the highest order if you think anybody but Apple is actually telling you how many phones they actually sold into the hands of consumers. And there's a reason they're not telling you, dummy!

  5. Re:2.3 million Android phones per day by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Actually I'm more surprised with Nokia taking 4.1% of the market.

    I'm not.

    Telcos over here are flogging 520s like they were being given kickbacks for every unit sold. They're being pushed as the default phone on corp deals and other promotions. I'm not sure who's making money off them, but somebody's surely spending a lot.