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.
Both are growing, however (Score:5, Insightful)
It is telling to note, that both Android and iPhone are growing market share at the expense of Blackberry and others, rather than at the expense of each other.
The more competition the better, I say.
Re:Both are growing, however (Score:5, Informative)
It's also telling to note that Android is still growing whilst Iphone is stagnating.
Android +6.4%
Iphone +0.8%
So the Iphone only just managed to grow beyond Palms 0.7% loss in share. RIM and Microsoft lost 4.1% and 1.8% respectively. This was in August, the Iphone4 rush was still ongoing but some reports suggested that 4 out of every 5 Iphone4's sold replaced an older model Iphone.
What happens if these rates are maintained?
Re:Both are growing, however (Score:4, Insightful)
Then iPhone will continue to grow at +0.8% share? Clearly it can't do that indefinitely.
I suspect there will be an upswing when it is released on Verizon. These are only US numbers after all.
When the iPhone went from O2 exclusive to all carriers in the UK (a while ago now, since before or around the time the 3GS came out), there was a large upturn in new owners from people who wanted to stay on their original carrier.
Those figures are also for Android as a whole (many handsets across multiple carriers) vs the iPhone (two handsets on a single carrier), so there's that to consider too.
The smartphone market needs decent competition, just like the computer software market as a whole does, lest we fall into a sole supplier situation - that is when things stagnate.
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iPhone is only sold on a single provider (AT&T) which has perhaps the most sucktastic customer service ever attributed to a company that still managed to stay in business. Expect iPhone sales to jump sharply when available on other platforms.
My prediction: iPhone and Android might trade places a few times, but Android will take the long term.
Re:Both are growing, however (Score:5, Insightful)
Most sensible people will be buying iPhones until Google stop demanding an Internet connection to use their search engine instead of installing to local SD card.
... are you telling me that you've invented an SD card capable of storing several petabytes of data?!
Re:Both are growing, however (Score:4, Funny)
Android has gzip built into the Linux kernels. It would take a while to run but it could be recursively gzipped until small enough to fit. The Scene do similar things, for example the downloaded Mariah Carey and inside the RAR file there was a ZIP file.
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Re:Both are growing, however (Score:4, Funny)
I want a Lucy Liu bot.
Re:Both are growing, however (Score:5, Funny)
Well not with that attitude
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I'm really trying to gauge whether you're joking. I want to laugh out loud but I'm not sure if it should be at you or with you.
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They are obviously new sales, otherwise the market would be growing.
So no new sales means that the market is growing.
Most sensible people will be buying iPhones until Google stop demanding an Internet connection to use their search engine instead of installing to local SD card.
OK, now you're not even trying. Kids today.
Re:Both are growing, however (Score:4, Insightful)
probably "lets learn how to design a cell phone at someone else's expense and risk"..
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You may have forgotten the fact that Apple still outsources all hardware manufacturing to contract manufacturers. This famously includes Foxconn, whom also manufacture phones for Nokia and Sony Ericsson. You also may have forgotten the hardware-related woes that afflicted the iPhone 4 release recently, or the iPod classic back in the day (not to rag on Apple too hard, these things do happen to the best of them).
You also seem to be implying that the only company in the world that is capable of designing nice
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WP7 is the competition you speak of.
It'll be interesting to see if WP7 adoption causes Microsoft's erosion to halt and start growing again over time. WP7 is decent enough as it is, and has some good updates coming out over the next year that should keep some excitement going on that front.
As for Apple, I think the Verizon iPhone will probably help them a great deal against Android, and they should reclaim their second spot quite easily I think.
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People still use word perfect?!? :)
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People still use word perfect?!? :)
Its been around for so long it can now read mail and function as a mobile phone OS.
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: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.
Gartner's prediction: Q4 2012 (Score:2)
Their prediction is for the whole world.
America != The whole word.
Re:Gartner's prediction: Q4 2012 (Score:4, Informative)
android already surpassed iphone in global market share. This happened quite a while ago. Look up smartphone on wikipedia
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Uh, no. It is perfectly accurate. It just depends if you are a consumer or a stock holder. If you are a stock holder, knowing that iPhone has more sales and bigger profit margins than the rest of the individual makers is important. If you are a consumer, knowing that there are a shit ton of competing phones with a single operating system and ecosystem is important. One assumes that Slashdot is not the business section, so what people care about is the largest platform with the most phones. Apple clear
Re:Gartner's prediction: Q4 2012 (Score:5, Funny)
In Soviet America telcos swap you.
The USA can still ride the lock in profit on rust belt networks.
Oh yeah? (Score:3, Informative)
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/apple-leads-smartphone-race-while-android-attracts-most-recent-customers/ [nielsen.com]
Obviously, someone is wrong on the Internet!
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:Oh yeah? (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple probably wasn't willing to concede control of iOS to Verizon. Now that iOS is a hit, Apple has bargaining power to retain control of the platform.
Android, however, is very much under the control of the carriers [techcrunch.com].
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I don't know if it was legal obligations or what, but Apple being kept off the largest carrier has hurt them a lot
Not legal obligations, but contractual, yeah.
And even though AT&T keeps sending me ads to "add a line" to my plan, suggesting all kinds of phones that aren't iPhones, everyone pretty much knows that if you're going to be on AT&T, an iPhone is the phone to have.
If Verizon gets the iPhone, I expect a lot of users will see it the same way over there.
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.
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Only if you consider 3% market share "a lot". Indeed, the article quoted points out that Android is just slightly outside the margin of error to tie with Apple (rim at .3% higher market share is considered to be tied with either one due to margin of error). With respect to margin of errors both articles agree. However you may want to take a gander at the upper graph in the article linked, Android has 40.8% of new sales and iPhone at 26.9% - roughly a 14 point difference and that *is* major (indeed, at that
Wha? (Score:2)
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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.
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For us, iPhone wasn't available on Verizon, so we bought the Droid and the Droid Eris. At first they were good phones, but every successful upgrade has added irritating bugs. As soon as the iPhone launches on Verizon, these Androids go up for sale on eBay.
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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.
Looks like the smartphone OS market is shaping up to be very similar to the desktop OS market, its Android vs. iOS instead of Windows vs. MacOS.... with one important difference... No Microsoft. Something that has Redmond very worried.
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There are many iPhone apps that tell you to do the same exact thing. If they won't run properly then reboot your phone and try again. I don't know what the percentage of the marketplace is like that but I have seen a few dozen or so that say that. These are apps that passed Apple's Q&A/review and got in their marketplace. So honestly I don't see much of a difference. If I don't reboot the iPhone 4 every so often it will get strange too. It's not surprising since most smart-phones are just computers that
Re:It's funny (Score:4, Informative)
"So what is making all these other people choose Android phones instead of iPhones, assuming they don't share my unique background and prejudices? "
The answer to your question is quite obvious. People are choosing Android because they are not having the same experience you claim to have had, instead they are quite enjoying Android even when switching from iPhone like myself.
I don't know what god forsaken Android device you purchased, but I haven't rebooted my htc incredible in weeks, and even then it only rebooted because i forgot to charge it two days in a row and it ran out of juice. I've never had any issue with stability. Nothing random or strange has ever, ever happened on my phone. In fact, it's much more stable than my iPhone ever was.
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No, I don't think U.S. owners can expect a 2.2 upgrade until Q2 2011, and even then, Motorola's track record with upgrades is a little spotty.
My problems with email are not Exchange-related, though (and I think Motorola's "skin" adds some of the Exchange capabilities 2.2. brings anyway). My initial email problem, actually, was that it absolutely would not work when I tried to connect my email via IMAP. I wouldn't see any messages at all. Reconfigure the same account for POP, though, and everything works fin
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Have you tried alternative email clients like K9 and MailDroid?
No, because I like Motorola's integrated inbox feature. But this is typical of the answers I get from other Android people: "Oh yeah, it's easy, provided you ditch the software it came with and use some third-party alternative." Again, I don't believe iPhone users have these problems. On the extreme end of things I hear answers like, "Oh yeah, it's easy, as long as you root your phone." But now you're talking about something that's typically beyond the understanding of your average phone user, and for somet
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Re:It's funny (Score:5, Funny)
I suppose iPhones lack of turn-by-turn navigation is ... a feature?
Turn-by-turn is ancient history. The iPhone will revolutionize they way you get from one place to another.
You anti-Apple zealots just can't see how brilliant the lack of turn-by-turn navigation is.
Here's a clue: It's easily twice as good as not having multi-tasking. Which was so unimaginably awesome back when we didn't have it.
6+ Companies and 20 Devices... (Score:3, Insightful)
So Motorola, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, HTC, LG, Meizu, and more have created well over 20 handsets on four networks which all together sell more in America than two models of 1 handset from Apple only on AT&T. These guys should be patting themselves on the back for a job well done.
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I think its all a load of BS (Score:3)
Seriously, I've come to the conclusion that all of these cellphone/smartphone marketshare/sales statistics are full of crap. Why do I say that? It seems like every single one of them shows a different contender in the lead, and usually whichever contender the presenter of said statistics is favoring at the moment. There are probably a hundred different ways these statistics can be compiled, and each one takes a slightly different approach. Sometimes they're comparing a particular quarter, alighted to a particular fiscal calendar. Sometimes they're limited the class of devices. Sometimes its US-only, and sometimes its Global. Whichever platform you like best, you'll find someone showing a survey/pie-chart/analysis showing how they're ahead of the competition.
Regardless, here's how I see the three mentioned players handling their game:
Not a Surprise (Score:2, Insightful)
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Because suddenly everyone would have Apple phones? Not everyone likes Apple.
Because it's otherwise flawless, right? Oh right, anyone with actual complaints against Apple is irrelevant and shouldn't be using smartphones anyway.
No, even with its flaws Android would still have a market.
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What all the bloviating about smartphones ignores is that there is a Gigantic pool of dumbphones and low end featurephones out there(and that a nontrivial slice of "smartphone
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When it expires and Apple is allowed to sell the iPhone with whoever they want, Google is going to be hurting.
Doubt it. Remember that the carrier exclusivity of the iPhone only exists in the US and maybe one or two other countries. In the vast majority of the world, it's a GSM phone like any other that you buy, pop your SIM card in (from any carrier) and off you go. And in all those countries, Android is doing quite well.
So I don't think the carrier exclusivity is holding Apple's sales in the US back as much as you might think. I mean, sure, it has SOME effect. But Android is a quality platform and I don't think th
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The only complaint about the iPhone is you can only use it on AT&T.
The only complaint? Really? Do you read much? Does "walled garden", "antenna-gate" or "unusable 3G/3Gs with iOS 4 until 4.2" ring a bell? What about continuous problems with syncing, data restoration and lost contacts? Overall, iOS is much less buggy than Android I will agree, but claiming that the only complaint about the iPhone is AT&T is just bunk.
Enjoy it while it lasts (Score:5, Funny)
Once iPhone comes to Verizon (likely the announcement is Tuesday and release February), the iPhone will again rise to the top.
The iPhone commands a huge market.... (Score:4, Insightful)
With JUST AT&T as a carrier.
When Verizon gets the iPhone, I say that the market share proposition shifts big towards iPhone.
Re:The iPhone commands a huge market.... (Score:4, Informative)
But look at the UK, where the iPhone is on every major network. Apple is currently stable at about 30% (although the article seems to write it as a large gain for Apple) and Android's growth is skyrocketing.
http://www.comscoredatamine.com/2010/12/symbian-still-leads-uk-smartphone-market-but-apple-and-google-are-gaining/ [comscoredatamine.com]
That units in use (Score:2)
I'm sure Apple is still making a lot more money from their hardware + software + cut of service fees + content sales + app sales + data harvesting.... ecosystem than all other players... combined, and creating nice lock-ins and network effects is the process.
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....
WP7 Data Problems (Score:3)
If Microsoft doesn't explain what is going on or fix the problem people are having of random unexplained large data transfers, then WP7 will end up a has been. People are reporting 50MB transfers during calls, and 500MB transfers each night. I would never own a phone that randomly or without my knowledge started sending large amounts of data out.
http://windowsphonemix.com/news/unusual-usage-of-data/ [windowsphonemix.com]
Until this is addressed I would say Microsoft has a major issue. It is either a PR, such as it needs to be explained, or a software issue and it needs to be fixed. Either way the longer Microsoft doesn't address the issue the more it hurts them.
Meanwhile in the rest of the world... (Score:4, Informative)
The global numbers are more amusing. Over the year, Nokia/Symbian has retained its majority market share, only dropping 7% in a market that has grown 64%; with Android and iOS more or less in equal competition for second place. (Source [asymco.com])
For some reason the discussion on the completely distorted US marketplace is amusing. But I question the relevance.
And finally, let me add that I vastly prefer my phone run an operating system that is designed to run phones, not an app or advertising channel primarily, no matter how shiny it looks.
Mart
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On second thought, they are making some money according to this URL. But 1bn a year is nothing compared to what Apple is making from iOS.
http://allaboutserver.net/google-android-revenue-now-running-at-1bn-per-year/
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Re:History repeats itself (Score:5, Insightful)
Because they are a business, not a charity.
Re:History repeats itself (Score:5, Insightful)
Err....
i'm puzzled why people think Google's ultimate aim was or should have been to make money on Android.
Maybe because they are a business????
Looks, it's really simple.
Apple makes iPhones, so that people buy iPhones, buy cell service from ATT (and soon Verizon), so that ATT (and soon Verizon) pay kick backs to Apple. Apple also generates revenue off Apps and Media sales.
Google built Android; so that Google can collect data, which is then used to better improve Google's searches. Improving Google's searches, and Google's ability to manipulate knowledge, enables Google to sell ads and other "in-the-cloud" services better.
For Apple, the iPhone is the platform. For Google, the Cloud is the platform. That's why iPhones are expensive, droid devices tend to be cheaper, and Google's network services are better.
Oh, and that's why Google builds services for other platforms; its not about selling Android phones, its about collecting data! Android phones collect data better than iPhones, but why limit the market?
And the mirror image of that is why the Apple App store is not available on other platforms; selling Applications is a secondary goal; selling iPhones (and the monolithic iOS ecosystem) is the primary goal, and the primary revenue driver.
People are going to have to understand that both companies are working for the betterment of mankind, but both companies seek to maximize revenue while they are at it. Google's profit drivers push Google toward being and omniscient, if usually benevolent big-brother in the cloud. Apple's profit drivers push Apple toward a monolithic ecosystem with Jobs firmly in control. But it is a *very* well designed ecosystem in which 3rd parties who are willing to play by the rules can prosper.
Shades of gray. Capitalism at work. The invisible hand. An exhibit in how pursuing the amoral in a competitive landscape can achieve the greater good.
*shrug*
basically. Google didn't monetize the hell out of it. that's a selling point. i'm tired of people / corporations thinking they can control me through their product just because they invented it. stop using your services as a launching platform for your personal holy crusades and simply provide people with what they want.
If that's what you are looking for, you should give up. Google's very clearly "giving away" services so that they can learn everything about you, and then tell Kraft exactly how many boxes of Mac and Cheese you might buy next month. For me, that's a reasonable trade-off; hell, you can argue that its a reasonable thing to make advertising "more relevant" and "more targeted".
Re:History repeats itself (Score:4, Insightful)
People are going to have to understand that both companies are working for the betterment of mankind,
Uh no. Neither company is working for the betterment of mankind. They are working only for their own betterment. Any improvement of the lot of the rest of us will be coincidental. Arguably, selling people phones they don't really need is just squandering our precious natural resources; both corporations (these are not book clubs or charities, but public corporations whose primary goal is to make a profit and maximize shareholder value) are arguably doing harm to the entire world.
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Yes. Google's seeing a lot of gold from Android installs.
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.
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Is there actual numbers on this? I though the norm on the marketplace was to sell everything for free but with ads. And now Google has competition from Amazon's app store, which is probably going to have a much more favorable business proposition for devs than Google's, since Amazon can accept payments from most anywhere on Earth, has better tie-ins with their store, etc.
A phone OS that pays for itself by pushing ads to you will always be a very special sort of hell. At least when Windows was beating App
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I think that for Google the primary driver for Android is not device/app revenue, but device/app data collection.
Google wants to know *everything* about you. With an Android device, they have expanded the realm of knowledge from:
Everything you do on the computer
To:
Everything you do on a Smart Phone.
This may include:
What time you get up in the morning (alarms)
What time you leave your home.
When you usually return to your home.
How often you go to bars.
How often you work (and for how many hours)
The length of ti
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No. Apple's App Store sell way more Apps than the Android Store does. Android owners don't bother with apps as much, and when they do get them, they rarely pay. And yet even for Apple the income from Apps is dwarfed by iPhone hardware sales.
Besides Google have made it
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Google isn't dumb, though. They see the real money they can make by getting in bed with the phone manufacturers and network providers. Thus, they invented a phone OS that undercuts anyone that would want to make money making something better, and allows the phone vendors and netw
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Apple's retail employees, for instance, are quite numerous; but they are utterly irrelevant to the question of how many distinct platforms Apple could hypothetically deliver high-quality builds of iOS on. Market cap and annual revenue are, if anything, higher because of their ability to succ
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Even more impressive than you consider that (atleast earlier, maybe we're too far into the year now, but it doesn't matter much for the comparision) Android only had a 3.5% market share just a year ago (eventually more, as said, so what if it was 13-14 months ago? ..)
People draw very weird conclusions for that though. Earlier I guess the conclusion was that Android would never get a foot in, and that iPhone was small but much bigger than Android. Now iPhone is pretty big and Android have had amazing growth.
Re:Verizon iPhone data plan (Score:4, Informative)
It almost certainly won't be, at least this year. My bet is a GSM/CDMA "iPhone 5" model (using the Qualcomm dual-transmitter chip) that runs on any US network this year, with a 4G "iPhone 6" next year, or perhaps with "iPhone 7" in 2013 (which, coincidentally, is when Verizon predicts their LTE coverage will "match current 3G area.")
The LTE chips are still very power-hungry, which means you either carry around a big battery pack, or you get sub-par battery life when 4G is active. It's also available in only a couple dozen cities around the US so far, with plans for "aggressive growth" this year and next. Early adopters may want the 4G, but that feature is pretty pointless outside of a fairly small number of urban areas. My guess is Apple doesn't want to limit itself to 10% of Verizon's customers, and will push for an initial release that will appeal to lots of people - a 3G-capable phone. I suspect we'll see one GSM & CDMA version, rather than two separate "Verizon" and "AT&T" versions, because Apple tends to favor simplicity in its product lineup, with a few key differentiators that are easily grasped: 16/32GB; Black/White. I don't see them willingly entering into a "Black/White, 16/32, GSM/CDMA, 3G/4G" type of model lineup - gets too confusing too quickly for customers.
Of course, this is just pure speculation, but I think it's the most likely course, given Apple's recent history and current product lineup.
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Your own article states that there is only a 1% lead on android. It looks like it could easily surpass iOS in less then a quarter.
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too little,too late.
Re:Stupid article--iOS is #1 in US market share (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Somebody mentioned that Jobs stated that the Macintosh was meant to be an "appliance". He meant it then as something common in every home or business - easy to use - not needing to be a genius to operate (back in 1984, that was the case for most people). I had a Apple DU - the Macintosh 128K as it was called before general release. I went to Drexel where we were forced to buy Macs (and, I fought it and I had just purchased an IBM PC with 64K of memory and a single floppy disk a year earlier using my own
Re:Many vs. one. . . (Score:4, Informative)
OK, I'm tired of people acting like Android isn't locked down to the end user as much as the iPhone is.
It's not an act. My Android phone allows me to install any application software I like, from any source, without having to jailbreak it or engage in any kind of hackery. The iPhone does not. Same goes for every T-Mobile Android phone. The only locked down Android phone is one of AT&T's.
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So first you are claiming that Apple's marketshare is composed of a single phone (when it's actually 4) and now you are adding in the iPad. What a sad, fanboy hypocrite you are.
From the article you linked to:
"Android OS is still the best-selling smartphone OS among recent acquirers in the last six months, with a 40.8 percent share, compared to 26.9 percent for iOS and 19.2 percent for RIM."
I'm sure the Verizon iPhone is going to reverse that trend. ;)
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Except you are wrong. The article refers to "Total U.S. Smartphone Subscribers Ages 13+"; it would include any Apple "smartphone" of which there are several. The point is moot, either Android has passed iOS or it is about to. Why you are motivated to lie about this is the interesting question.
Apples, oranges, and bananas (Score:3)
This article is stupid. It's comparing a single smartphone to an entire platform running on multiple smartphones. When you compare platforms, iOS is #1 in U.S. marketshare according to the recent Nielsen report [gigaom.com].
Beware of what's being counted, and how.
The Nielsen report you cited lumps iPad users in with iPhone users. That's hardly a single platform; the iPad is far more akin to a laptop or netbook in terms of "mobility" than a smartphone. It's also based on Nielsen's Web usage monitoring, and it's well-known that iPad users are very heavy Web browsers -- mostly from home.
Overall, I find the tech "journalism" about this issue to be a dismal example of the innumeracy that mars much of the profession. Reading tech bl
There's room for both Apple and Google (Score:5, Informative)
Apple is having amazing growth in smartphones also and the inclusion of more carriers in the US may help them some. I know a lot of people who just won't do business with AT&T even for an iPhone. There are a lot of Verizon customers who would like to give it a go. The share numbers don't exactly tell the whole tale either as the market for smartphones is also growing at an amazing pace. Apple makes a lot of money on every phone, they're selling a huge number of phones, and they're having huge growth. They should see a good bump when they open up to other carriers in the US. Their vast economies of scale are saving them on the Cost Of Goods Sold also. Any time Apple wants to take market share from Android all they have to do is indulge in that fragmentation bugaboo that seems to not be holding Android back and offer a variety of phones with different feature sets and price points for the folk who aren't a good fit for The iPhone. Frankly I hope they don't - they're consuming a large enough share of the world's production capacity for displays and Flash memory already.
But Google and Apple are not Microsoft. Neither of them has taken the position that for them to win everybody else has to lose. Their goal is not to own the market and use their dominance to suppress progress like it's some tech version of King of the Hill. Apple is going to take for the most part the premium end of the business and Android will take the volume. They'll each get a chunk of RIM's enterprise share. Every developer worth their salt is writing for both platforms now so they're getting some app-fusion going on. In the end there will be a lot more Android phones than Apple phones if for no other reason than not everybody in the world can afford an iPhone and the iPhone feature set doesn't meet everybody's needs and can't, no matter how awesome that feature set is because people have conflicting needs. Some people need battery life, some daylight-readable displays, some huge storage, some need low price, some need a physical keyboard, some want the thinnest possible phone. Apple will get a bunch of dollars, Google will get many more dimes and it will work out well for both. They'll both innovate as fast as they can to compete with each other, so we all win.
Everybody else though? It sucks to be you. You can't have the premium end, you can't have the volume end. You can't crack enough market share to get good developers because one cheesy breakout app on iOS and Android (Angry Birds [rovio.com]) moved 50 million units and that's the KaChing lotto developers are looking for. You can't get the mobile ad dollars either. If you create a niche hardware feature it'll be on an Android phone in six months. If you create a useful evolution of the user interface it'll be a UI skin available on both iOS and Android with a dozen competing versions in three weeks ranging in price from ten dollars to free, and the developers will make more money on the skin than you will on the platform. Apple and Google have between them got this thing sewn up. Just to make it completely unfair those app and media stores and the Google home page are awesome places from which to sell the next generation products that latecomers are not going to have access to.
Tablets? I don't see any reason why the same story shouldn't play out there. Android's getting a late start like it did with phones, but there's only one iPad just like there's only a couple models of iPhone. There are hundreds of Android slates coming out to hit every price point and feature desired. They're not quite too late to the party. Apple should get the premium end again with the lion's share of the profits at a good margin because they have the innovator's advantage, the product is damn good, and the iPad 2 will be even better. Android should get the volume again and have to work harder for their money but rake it in too. By the time a credible third player shows up we
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I'm guessing here (translation: pulling it out of my ass), but I expect that while most Americans get that there is a concept of freedom which America is supposed to stand for, few realise how it affects them in day-to-day life. There was NOT a massive rejection of the Repubs after the Patriot Act. There was NOT a massive rejection of the Dems after Obamacare or the TSA's groping powers (it was pretty slight so far, and I'm betting on term #2 for Obama regardless). Why should something so minor as a phon
Re:There's room for both Apple and Google (Score:5, Insightful)
If your Ford car could only use Ford gas and only drive on Ford roads, or if your Sony TV could only tune to Sony channels, then you might have a point.
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You can't install apps that Apple hasn't approved. You can't use internet formats that Apple hasn't allowed. You generally can't replace Apple programs or even have access to programs that provide the same functions.
If Ford restricted their customers to approved gas stations or only roads which they deemed appropriate, people would be furious. As we are seeing more an more often, people don't like Apple's attempt to do similar things any better.
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Perhaps you're so deluded by your fan-boism that you don't realise what the /. crowd generally find distasteful about the iPhone and iPad. It's not that it's from Apple (Macs are generally still well-liked around here, partially based on the BSD kernel - though I have no use for Macs myself). It's the lock-in. In general, /. hates lock-in from any vendor. Heck, I remember even ChromeOS getting the hate-on for being so locked down, and that's from one of our favourite companies (Google) based on one of o
Moot point (Score:5, Insightful)
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The conversation is about the market penetration of cellular phone OS's, not about the market penetration of the physical phones themselves.
Did you even read my comment? If it was about OS penetration then why are they excluding some of Apple's devices that use the same OS?
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Because they're not phones.
The android devices are all phones.
an iPod is not a phone. Yes, using a wifi connection an app you can make VOIP calls, but it is not a cellular phone.
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iPhone isn't really a single device... it's 3GS and iPhone 4, along with a few 3Gs and even some of the original phones still around. So really, four devices/models.
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iPhone is a single device? That's really strange I thought I could buy 3 different versions at my local AT&T store. The iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 (16 gig) and the iPhone 4 (32 gig). Not to mention all the older iPhones out there that count as marketshare since they haven't been upgraded/updated yet. The iPhone 3GS and the iPhone 4 series are very different from each other in features and horsepower. So no there is not just 1 model of iPhone no matter how you look at it.
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I agree, though to be fair, iTunes has gotten slightly less annoying over the last couple of years.
But I loathe iTunes so much that when my iPhone 4 contract is up, I'll be taking a hard look at WP7. If I can't find something I like there, I'll look hard at Android. And ONLY if I can't find anything there, will I even remotely trying iPhone.next.
Re:iTunes is most obnoxious sw ever (Score:5, Informative)
The feature is obvious:
* Plug in iPhone with iTunes open
* iPhone backs up automatically
If automatic syncing is turned off then do the following:
* Plug in iPhone
* Click iPhone in the left panel when it appears
* Click sync
The very first step of the sync process is backing up your phone, and it tells you it is doing that, every time you sync *unless* you sync shortly after already doing a full backup without disconnecting it or unlocking the phone with the slide control. The button is large and easy to see. And if the user has been using their phone "every week" then it will be immediately obvious.
Alternatively, if you want to use right click, you can do so by doing this:
* Plug in iPhone
* Right click on the iPhone when it appears in the left panel and select "back up".
Hunt around the net for how to back it up? Goodness me. Have you never used a computer before? It took you "over ten minutes" to find this? I'm amazed you managed to even register for a slashdot account. How did you find out how to submit the form?
Even if you had never used iTunes before, a computer literate person should have no trouble finding out how to back up an iPhone. I googled "how to back up iphone" also, and timed how long it took me to get to a page that told me how to do it: seven seconds, including the time it took me to open the tab and type the words and for the page to load. I could have shaved off some time by clicking "I'm feeling lucky" since I clicked on the top result, which was an Apple knowledgebase article.
Also, not to drag up that old flamebait nonsense, but the Mac has been supporting multi button mice since OS 8, and shipping with them since the mid 90s.
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You're backtracking, having been called on something. I might as well say "lolz, Windows bluescreens all the time, you have to reboot it every night" but it doesn't make it true, and using it as an argument for something totally unrelated is just nonsense.
Your eMac supports a two button mouse, and always has. All of the menus and OS, plus shipped apps support it. Reality wins again!
That "crappy interface" that confused the user is not the issue - a "well educated computer literate" user that took over 10 mi
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Correction, it warns you *very explicitly* that your are not syncing with your "home" computer, and you have to click through at least two warnings that it will restore your phone if you proceed to sync with a new computer.
It doesn't just "rebuild your phone".
You get plenty of warning.
Re:The real surprise here.... (Score:4)