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

2.3 million Android phones per day

[symbolset]

Samsung alone accounts for 1 million of those, leaving 1.3 million per day for others. Here are the per-company numbers.

It will be interesting to see if LG can deliver enough of the Nexus 5 to bump their numbers over the holidays.

Apple made the same mistake

[etash]

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.

Re:Apple made the same mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Apple made the same mistake

[antifoidulus]

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.

Re:Apple made the same mistake

[servies]

....

While their phone is inferior, it is "good enough" for all they need to do

....

but mostly because they see that their cheap phone can do EVERYTHING my iPhone can do at a quarter of the price.

So with that last sentence you're saying it's superior to your iPhone....

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

[crimson tsunami]

Cut him some slack.
He's just bitter that he's stuck in the apple world partly because of the apps he bought, partly due to pride in defending his choice.

Re:Apple made the same mistake

[Sockatume]

You're conflating marketshare and sales volume. If your sales volume goes down, so does your marketshare* but the inverse is not true. Your sales volume can be increasing - and with it your profits - while your marketshare declines, simply because other companies are now selling products in your sphere. As long as volume is good and your margins are good, you keep making money.

This is why Apple continued to be profitable in the days when all it was selling was iMacs and Powerbooks to a tiny portion of the market: they made money on every unit sold and the number of units they sold was enough for them to operate. This is why Apple's balance sheet was at its healthiest in the period when its smartphone marketshare was declining most rapidly: there was a boom on, and their volumes were increasing spectacularly even as their share shrank.

I'd be more concerned about all the phone companies who are making losses every quarter on their devices, despite growing market share. If you're selling 10% of the world's smartphones and you're losing $100 per device sold you need to turn that around or you are up the creek.

*Unless the whole market is shrinking, but that wasn't the case for Nokia or Blackberry

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:Apple made the same mistake

[Bert64]

Same thing happened with computers, Apple only really competed at the higher end with SCSI drives and color screens, while crude ibm-compatible clones could be had for a fraction of the price. People are quite ok with inferior so long as its cheaper and "good enough", especially during tougher economic times. And once you've bought into one system, the cost of escaping it for another incompatible system is high because you'd need to reacquire all your applications.

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.

Re:Apple made the same mistake

[AmiMoJo]

These days it's the opposite. The Nexus 5 beats the iPhone 5S in pretty much every area. Better screen, NFC, wireless charging, full 1080p video output, better camera, and arguably better software. Yet it costs half the price.

At one point you could reasonably argue that it was worth paying extra for an iPhone, but these days unless you are already locked in I think it's going to be hard to justify paying double for an inferior or at best equal product.

Re:Apple made the same mistake

[Therad]

I wouldn't be surprised if the teenager has more "phone needs" than the parent.

Re:Apple made the same mistake

[dfghjk]

And the BIOS was published in source form and you could buy technical reference manuals for it. Some secret it was!!!

Re:Apple made the same mistake

[StripedCow]

If these companies could put their greed aside, we'd already be running apps from one OS on another OS, and the interoperability would be seemless.
The technology is there.
Everything would be simpler.
And less development effort would go to waste.

Capitalism is just working against us here.

Expensive Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

Here in Australia, Apple have completely priced themselves out of the market.
iPhone 5S 16 GB: $869
Compared with a brand-spanking-new:
Google Nexus 5 16 GB: $420 (inc. shipping)
It's hard to justify _double_ the price for effectively the same thing.
Needless to say ... I just bought the Nexus 5.

Niche market

[Udo Schmitz]

[] 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/

Re:Niche market

[aiadot]

Yeah, from my perspective I can't help but to notice the huge boner most people on internet have towards market share and mainstream market acceptance, regardless if it's for smartphones, computers, game consoles and accessories or services. People just seem to forget that business are about making money. Having a huge share may have some help with it, but that is not always true.

Re:Niche market

[Sockatume]

He's annoyed that they aren't free-as-in-speech, in that Google is making the most fundamental Android apps proprietary. The open-source versions have been abandoned by them. It'd be like if Ubuntu was still ostensibly open-source but everything outside of the window manager had to be written by the customer or bought via a non-compete licence agreement with Canonical.

Re:Niche market

[Anne Thwacks]

Only because dickheads like HTC keep making phones which dont have removable SD cards and batteries because they believe the moron that told them that is why iPhones sell.

Hell, as a real world user, and not a paid reviewer, I prefer Samsung's plastic case, because it is harder to damage, and my phone rarely leaves its leather case anyway.

All my family has Samsung phones, and every single one will change brand next contract if another brand has a better offering.

Some had iPhones b4, but poor reception and broken screens led to a change of heart.

Re:Niche market

[Gunboat_Diplomat]

Yeah, from my perspective I can't help but to notice the huge boner most people on internet have towards market share and mainstream market acceptance, regardless if it's for smartphones, computers, game consoles and accessories or services. People just seem to forget that business are about making money. Having a huge share may have some help with it, but that is not always true.

Depends on whether you are thinking as an investor or consumer I guess. I find it puzzling when consumers have a huge boner for the extreme profit margin a manufacturer is extracting from them ;)

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?

Ahh, another no-name two-bit "analytics" firm!

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:Are *ALL* Nokia phones *smartphones* ??

[Therad]

The stats are only for smartphones, so they are correct.