Nearly 9 Out of 10 Smartphones Shipped Run On Android (cnet.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: Google's Android operating system was the big winner in a big time for worldwide phone shipments, market researcher Strategy Analytics reported Wednesday. Android captured 88 percent of all smartphone shipped in the third quarter of 2016, a period that also marks the fastest growth rate in a year. "Android's gain came at the expense of every major rival platform," Strategy Analytics' Linda Sui said in a press release. "Apple iOS lost ground to Android and dipped to 12 percent [market]share," primarily because of "lackluster" sales in China and Africa, she said. And don't bother looking for BlackBerry and Microsoft Windows phones in the mix. They "all but disappeared" in the period between July 1 and the end of September. While Android's leading position looks "unassailable," it does face challenges in a market filled with phones made by hundreds manufacturers, few of which turn a profit. That's not helped by Google's new Pixel phone, which competes against the companies that made it popular in the first place, Strategy Analytics said. About 375 million smartphones shipped in the third quarter of 2016, up 6 percent from 354.2 million units in the same period last year. Shipments of Android-based phones rose 10.3 percent, while Apple's iPhones fell 5.2 percent.

Comments

Re:Unlikely

[duke_cheetah2003]

People that think they matter use iPhones. Period.

Fixed that for ya.

The choice

[duke_cheetah2003]

Let's see, I can choose between:

iPhone: Proprietary, unchangeable, walled garden, one vendor, one device.

Android: Open source, changeable, free, many vendors, many devices.

Is this even a choice?

Re:The choice

[JaredOfEuropa]

iPhone: works great if it does what you need it to do out of the box, which it does for many people. If it doesn't, it sucks.
Android: works great if you choose the right device, vendor (and even service provider), and spend some time tweaking it. If you don't, it sucks.

The iPhone works well for me, if I can't see the walls around the garden I don't care about them, and I don't want to have to tweak my phone (install 3rd party tools or remove crapware) to make it work well. I hate my stock Android device (that I use for work) with a passion, but that's just me.

One thing though: I start bumping into those Apple walls more and more often, and so do other ordinary people. For example: speech recognition, which is incredibly useful in certain applications like home automation, and something that people want. App developers have been able to hook into Google's speech stuff for donkeys years now, but on iOS Apple only recently announced the eagerly awaited 3rd party access to the Siri API... which turns out to be exceedingly clunky and limited to only 6 domains: ride booking, online payments, messaging, that sort of thing. No home automation, not yet and probably not ever because Apple have their own HA offering: HomeKit. Which is still very much in its infancy and not very good even in basic setups, because it doesn't play nice with other kit. More walls... That's something that Apple need to be careful about; if this happens once too often, people will switch.

Re:The choice

[bloodhawk]

Let's see, I can choose between:

iPhone: Proprietary, unchangeable, walled garden, one vendor, one device.

Android: Open source, changeable, free, many vendors, many devices.

Is this even a choice?

I use a Samsung Galaxy S7. I don't think ANY of your options are reasons for the majority of consumers. They care about price, features and interacting with their friends with another smaller (but highly lucrative target group) caring about fashion and trend. The people that give a shit about the proprietry/open source/walled garden etc stuff is so insignificant that I don't think either side intentionally targets them.

Re:Dumbphones replaced by smartphones

[gmack]

I don't know why you put smartphone in quotes. My current smartphone cost me $150 USD for an octo core CPU and 3 GB ram/ dual SIMs etc. That's deep into the smartphone category and just as capable as a far more expensive phone.

Just as a thought experiment...

[OpenSourced]

Imagine what would have happened if it was the iPhone 7 battery the one exploding here and there. The hit that iOS would have taken would have been brutal. However, while Samsung suffers, Android doesn't even register the Note 7 debacle. Samsung could disappear tomorrow and other companies would take its sales in a blink. Evolution at work. That's because Android is a platform, not a company. In the end, platforms, specially if they are somewhat open, always trump companies.

Some day Apple will make a bad mistake, like Samsung has done, and then its trademark will suffer. If the mistake is bad enough, they might never recover from it. If they don't make a big mistake, they might make lots of small ones, and also lose ground. If they don't make either a big or many small mistakes, then some innovative company with a better product will pop up somewhere and be the next cool thing. And the important thing is that this company will be forced to use Android because Apple does not license iOS.

So in the end Apple always loses, because they use a closed environment and that means that they don't allow evolution to work. That fact has been obscured by the real genius that Apple has shown these past years in creating a whole new category of devices. That gives you a nice head start, of course, but it's finished now. Their market share is starting to reflect the realities of the dead hand of markethistory :-)