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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."
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.
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!