Android Passes iPhone In US Market Share 550
Adrian writes "61.5 million people in the US owned smartphones during the three months ending in November 2010, up 10 percent from the preceding three-month period. For the first time, more Americans are using phones running Google's Android operating system than Apple's iPhone, but RIM's BlackBerry is still in first place, according to comScore. RIM fell from 37.6 percent to 33.5 percent market share of smartphones, Google captured second place among smartphone platforms by moving from 19.6 percent to 26.0 percent of US smartphone subscribers, and Apple slipped to third despite its growth from 24.2 percent to 25.0 percent of the market. Microsoft, in fourth place, fell into single digits from 10.8 percent to 9.0 percent while Palm was still last and further slipped from 4.6 percent to 3.9 percent."
This is not unexpected, since Android sales have been outpacing iPhone sales for some time, but it happened significantly earlier than Gartner's prediction: Q4 2012.
It's funny (Score:4, Interesting)
I, too, bought an Android phone in November (Motorola Defy). I like it, it's going to work out fine for me. But I have to admit, compared to the iPhone and BlackBerry both, my phone's OS is buggy and clunky, the stock Android stuff is lacking features, and the attempts by the handset maker (Motorola) to make up for its deficiencies don't mesh well with the core OS. Unexplained things happen every so often, which don't really phase me as a seasoned computer user, but would drive my mom bats.
The manual actually tells you to reboot the phone every so often. I don't disagree with this -- seems like sound advice for a device of this complexity -- but by comparison, my BlackBerry would actually reboot itself automatically every night if I wanted it to. And it turns out that if you don't reboot this phone, after a while it might do stuff like, oh, silently stop receiving your email. Reboot and ten messages show up. As a former BlackBerry user, that is not good. That is bad. And that's just one example -- it seems like random things will start to happen, which might frustrate you if you didn't feel OK with just rebooting the phone. (Though to be fair, any reluctance I have to reboot comes from me being a BlackBerry user, where rebooting is the last thing on Earth you want to do.)
I switched from BlackBerry because I felt like my BlackBerry Pearl was getting long in the tooth, and none of the new models appealed to me. Plus, change is good every now and then. I didn't pick iPhone for various reasons, mostly relating to not wanting to do business with either Apple or AT&T (and certainly not Verizon, when that happens). But I gotta admit, iPhone is the better phone. So what is making all these other people choose Android phones instead of iPhones, assuming they don't share my unique background and prejudices? It's not price -- as far as I can tell, that's pretty comparable for both platforms these days.
Re:Oh yeah? (Score:5, Interesting)
A 2 point market share lead according to Nielsen is "a lot"? Both reports are within 3 points of each other. But while Apple is growing less than 1 point per quarter, Google is growing around 6.5 points. According to either report, if the trends exhibited through November continued, Google would be ahead of Apple by today anyway.
It'll be interesting to see what the Verizon iPhone does for iOS. I don't know if it was legal obligations or what, but Apple being kept off the largest carrier has hurt them a lot, and allowed Android to build up a lot of momentum I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have had otherwise.
Re:History repeats itself (Score:5, Interesting)
Google GIVES away android so that they can have handset marketshare, and thus a MUCH bigger cut of APP money than Apple will ever have.
Re:It's funny (Score:1, Interesting)
My Droid 2 has been pretty rock solid.
I've picked up some friends' iPhones (1 through 4) and had them freeze within the first few seconds of messing with them. Given they did recover, my point is the iPhone isn't bullet proof like so many people seem to think....
Andriod - restarting Asian Consumer Electronics (Score:3, Interesting)
At the expense of the Canada/US/Europe (Blackberry/Apple/Nokia).
Seriously all those companies (Samsung/LG/HTC.....) would never have agreed on a standard OS if it wasn't for being scared into it by Apple /Blackberry.
Google really saved there hides by coming up with a very competent mobile OS.
A free OS with expectation of pumping us full of ads.
Seriously competition is frustrating when Apple/ Google start copying the worst parts of the OS (Google got rid of the return policy/ Apple buys an ad company)...
Not to mention the new trend of providers "Capping" all you can use mobile bandwidth.
Competition is good for consumers but I see a disturbing trend.
Sigh..
Hopefully because there are more players in this market "the web" remains a viable platform so the device matters less.
I don't own a smartphone....
Re:Oh yeah? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not one to gush about Apple; however, let's agree that whatever birthright apple sold to Singular, it sold in exchange for user's rights; specifically, the right of the user to shop for applications provided by other than the network carrier. For that I am a grateful Android customer.
You guys are like Vista lovers (Score:4, Interesting)
For years here on /. there were Vista fans who would not stop praising that piece of ineffable crap. A few persist still. It sucked. We all knew it sucked. "Buy a new PC" they would say, and the replies came back - "It is a new PC and it came with this crap." And still they would not quit. A thousand sockpuppets praising it from your Bangalore blog center are not going to make it not suck. Berating honest folk who tried it and share their sucky experience are not going to make it fly, nor quench the flood of people who are reporting that yes, it does have negative atmospheric pressure. The problem with it wasn't the marketing. It was the engineering. To get some traction here on /. and in the real world, the thing has to actually not suck.
WP7 is not good. It's not even close to good. It STILL lacks features like multitasking and copy & paste in 2011. A new contender doesn't have to have some good stuff - it has to hit all the corners and then have something special nobody else has got. Some new WP7 features are now promised, but updates to the KIN were promised too. Top-ten category apps are moving in the single digits of units - lifetime, not monthly or daily. It is a joke on itself.
I'm rereading this before posting, and am finding that this part doesn't have enough emphasis. So I'll say it plain: There are Top Ten apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace that have five sales total ever. This is not going to fund a development budget. They've reached 5,000 apps now so the vast majority of developers have to have no buyers at all, and probably less than a dozen downloads too. That is some serious suction.
Microsoft has somehow pushed 1.5M units into inventory at the merchants, probably on consignment, but they have no hope of actually selling them. The backlash when this all unravels will be epic.
Do you want to make a product that gets the /. crowd fawning all over you? I'll tell you how: raise the bar. Deliver something that does something current tech won't do. Make something that enables and empowers us to do the stuff that we want and need to do. Let us connect better with the people we care about. Let us get our work done more easily. And when we want that, get the hell out of our way.
Quit trying to believe that enough money thrown at marketing will put over a product that sucks. I know the advertisers you're working with say they can sell a turd sandwich, but we're not buying it. Their job isn't really to sell us stuff, it's to sell you advertising.
We here know that KIN [slashdot.org] had 300,000 facebook friends and under a thousand buyers. You can't put that BS over here any more. Try PCWORLD or Computerworld or whatever. They'll take your ad money and fluff your dolphin, or whatever the euphemism is today.
Re:Stupid article--iOS is #1 in US market share (Score:5, Interesting)
Does it really matter?
Yes, it does matter.
I'm a Mac user. I have been for 20+ years. I have two Macs, an AppleTV, and four iPods in the house. So I'm not religiously opposed to Apple, far from it.
But I am utterly opposed to a future where the hardware vendor is allowed to decide what software is allowed to run on computers. That's why I want to see iOS fail. I want to see it drop to single digit market share and be abandoned by developers. I want it to fail so badly that nobody ever tries the same thing again. Same for Windows 7 Phone.
...Though if Steve Jobs added a jailbreak checkbox in the preferences and opened up the platform, I'd probably buy in immediately. Though frankly at this point Android is blatantly outstripping iOS in capability, so Apple's window of opportunity to open the platform and get more buy-in is closing quickly.
Re:bad comparison (Score:4, Interesting)
I like the iPhone, don't get me wrong - but you're off the mark here.
Arguing that you can't compare iPhones to Android by market share is simply a semantic quibble. Better stated, the study compares "All phones that run iOS" versus "All phones that run Android." It just so happens that "all phones that run iOS" are "iPhones," and so it's more convenient for the authors to say they're comparing "iPhones" to "Android".
The comparison stands: in the smartphone market, Android has taken a small, but very real lead over iOS. This is not necessarily a bad thing: competition makes both platforms better. I don't see a future where "every phone is Android," and I think it's entirely possible that Apple would be content with 20-25% share of a very profitable market while Android expands down into the less-expensive end (where margins are very thin, a space where Apple has historically avoided competing), and ends up with a much larger slice of the phone market than Apple's iOS devices.