Android Users Aren't As Disloyal As Reported 246
ergo98 writes "As we discussed recently, a CNN article had a statement that '77% of iPhone owners say they'll buy another iPhone, compared to 20% of Android customers who say they'll buy another Android phone.' This was a gross misrepresentation. The CNN story now has up this note: 'Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that 20% of Android customers say they'll buy another Android phone. The survey actually revealed that 20% of all smartphone customers say they'll buy an Android phone.' The Yankee Group has further sought to clarify the situation by saying that the 20% are people who explicitly said they would buy a 'Google-branded' phone (which excludes the overwhelming majority of popular Android phones) — as Google gets out of the business of selling branded phones. Summarizing their position on Android: 'Yankee Group still believes that Android will become the next breakout mobile phone platform, making it the third most popular platform behind iPhone and RIM's Blackberry in installed base for at least the next five years.'"
What an Idiotic Blunder (Score:5, Insightful)
How many Android users know what they're using? (Score:4, Insightful)
Damage is already done (Score:2, Insightful)
AT&T and Apple couldn't have bought better advertising.
Even the original statement, 20% of android users are going to get a new phone vs 77% of apple users being happy was biased reporting. If reported in an unbiased manner that would be 80% happy android users vs 77% Apple or 20% unhappy vs 23%, etc. Both would be the positive or the negative.
Note: As a mildly respected member of the Slashdot community I didn't RTFA just TFS so the article may not have been biased at all.
Re:Confirmation Bias? (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe it was actually confirmation bias from the said Apple fan, that Android was so disliked and hence he got taken in by the false report?
Why does this have to be an 'either/or' question? We all know surveys like this don't really provide an actual usable data.
Re:Confirmation Bias? (Score:5, Insightful)
In my experience people who bemoan others for 'preconceived notions' are most often the ones truly guilty of it. Similarly, to be 'open-minded' has simply come to mean 'alternately' or 'unconventionally' 'minded'. Sad world we live in where cultural-mental 'progress' is merely a shift and all the same problems exist; but I've gotten off topic.
It's still looks pretty bad...but it's not. (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonetheless, even though Android doesn't seem to be getting a lot of love lately (or at least according to this survey), the thing to keep in mind is that Android's market presence has become notably stronger since the G1 came out. I honestly think that from a phone perspective, the Nexus One had serious potential to realistically compete with the iPhone (3GS) behemoth, considering that it's similar to the iPhone while offering a completely different, and completely usable, experience at a lower price. It's a shame that Google (and T-Mobile!) didn't promote the phone as actively as they could have; it had TONS of potential. Look at how well the Droid's doing on Verizon! (Yes, the Samsung Galaxy S line is much more feature-rich, but it's a toy. The Nexus One was a statement...and a damned good looking one.)
Let's put it this way: at least it's not just Blackberry and Windows Mobile anymore!
Push Poll (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a marketing strategy known as the Push Poll (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_poll).
You ask the questions in such a way as to get the answer you want.
Re:I sense a disturbance in the force (Score:5, Insightful)
It's as if millions of fanboys suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced
and replaced by the cries of millions of opposing fanboys.
So tired of phone drama (Score:2, Insightful)
Buy whatever phone you like and shut up about it.
Re:iPhone will lose (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What an Idiotic Blunder (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: Google branded; People fully immersed in a traditional closed-architecture business model may have trouble wrapping their brains around Android.
The i-phone is a device created by a manufacturer. It has a gui and an app store and a bazillion apps and these things only run on the device from this manufacturer. Sales of the device are easy to track -- Apple sells a certain number of phones, and that is the sum total of i-phones sold.
Android is not a device. Trivially it's an operating system, but it's also a set of expectations -- app store, gui, and so forth. To compare the two, you have to agree about what you're comparing. If you're comparing Apple's phone with Google's phone, Apple has sold a crapload more phones than Google. Hands down, end of story.
If you're comparing phones running Apple's OS with Google's OS, the numbers change but things get murky. What do you compare the 4G to? Android 2.1? 2.2? If a phone runs the Android OS but has a GUI customized by the vendor, does it count?
Re:Confirmation Bias? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm going to guess neither. I'd imagine it was more of an application of Sagan's Law: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
A study that says that a popular smartphone OS is so bad that only 20% of its users plan to buy another one is an extraordinary claim. If that were true, there's no way that a second or third manufacturer would start building phones based on the same OS and technology, much less the almost two DOZEN smartphone makers currently building Android-based phones. Even as an iPhone user, I'd have a had time believing that sort of a stat. It's just absurd on the face of it.
Re:Statistics (Score:3, Insightful)
I think your math is a bit off
20% of all smartphone users say they are going to buy Android, including current Android owners. Pretending for a second that people actually do what they say they'll do and that everybody upgrades their phones at the same time, Android would get 20% of the market.
We know that 77% of current iPhone users will buy another one but we don't know about how many the other 72% of smartphone users will buy iPhones. So all we know is that at least 21% (28% * 77%) of current smart phone owners will buy an iPhone, but it's likely to be much higher.
Re:Statistics (Score:4, Insightful)
The maths is all a bit off, unknown survey, with unknown breakdown, using unknown group, says 15 percent of cows jump over the moon (not maths that wrong). Seriously your playing with numbers from a survey with undeclared methods, you have got to be joking.
The reality is the majority of smart phone users will end up going with Android for two main reasons, lots of hardware choice (including a lot of cheaper hardware), service supplier choice and of course 'free' application choice. Google only ever produced it's own branded phone to kick up interest in Android, once that was done and it did work really well, they dropped it.
Even the android demo on PC under windows is popular, hopefully Google will produce a 'one click' download and install so that more people can more readily play with it (rather a smack in M$'s nose if people really like it and continue to use is as a app). The Apple market'droids' are working overtime pretending to be fanbois and it isn't really working and is really starting to become rather distasteful.
Apple has some really creative people, perhaps it is time to shift to a web focus and show M$ how a better company can creative a far more successful version of MSN under another name, hmm, how about, the 'core' ;).
Re:Confirmation Bias? (Score:2, Insightful)
Someone else already pointed out the settings configuration on Android, which is massive, hard to navigate, and hard to find things in.
Scrolling is, imo, terrible on Android. It feels like I'm working hard to scroll, and there are delays from when I move my finger to when the scrolling starts. This seems like a minor complaint, but this sort of thing (input lag from when you make the input to when you see results) is really a big deal in HCI.
The mail client is simply atrocious. Gmail is fine, but then you're stuck with Gmail services. I run my own mail server, and have no interest in using Gmail for my primary contacts. Incidentally, iOS4 has a much better mail client than iPhone OS 3. Threading is one of the big big things I've wanted in a mobile phone email client. k9mail, probably the best alternate email client on Android, doesn't do threading either, but is far and away better than the stock client. I haven't found an email client for Android which does threading.
Tap to zoom is far better on iOS4.
I really need to start keeping a list of these issues so that I can just link to it every time someone asks. There are a ton of little things that keep popping up and making me want to sell the Droid and cancel my contract, but I just live with it.