I've been keeping track of Comscore's numbers for a while and I've been looking for the Verizon bump that iPhones were supposed to receive. Looking at the derivative of the trends there does appear to be a small change but the effect is small and Android's growth is still about 3x the iPhone's.
One thing to consider is that these numbers are market share, they don't show how the overall pie is growing.
(By the way, Comscore wants you to pay for historical data so they wouldn't like this being posted publicly, but I've been collecting this data from their press releases.)
First, thanks for the historical data. That's nice to see.
But it doesn't seem to me that we'd expect to see an immediate bump in iPhone's numbers from Verizon for at least three reasons unrelated to the platform's (potential) desirability:
1) The iPhone has a lot more competition among Verizon customers. For a while, if you wanted a good smartphone with AT&T, you were getting an iPhone. We wouldn't expect to see "auto-flocking" to the iPhone on Verizon like there was on AT&T for that reason.
2) Contract rollover inhibits fast reaction to new developments. I know a substantial number of people who went Android with the Motorola Droid release in November, 2009. For a 2 year contract, that means November, 2011 is when those customers will be reevaluating their smartphone brand.
3) For some people who wanted an iPhone, they probably bought an iPhone regardless of the network. iPhone on Verizon was (or will be) a chance for some people to change carriers and keep the phone they love.
I think those three factors inhibit a massive switch to iPhone simply because of its availability on a new carrier. Other factors may play a role, too. For instance, AT&T put a lot of their own advertising weight behind the iPhone. Verizon hasn't platformed the iPhone in the same way.
By my calculation, there have been about 130 million Android devices sold to date, and over 200 million iOS devices (including iPads and iPod touches). I haven't found an easy way to get these numbers. Here are my sources:
It looks like iOS still has at least 50% more users than Android.
But none of that matters compared to the one number I find hardest to determine:
How much money is sent to third-party developers on each platform?
Meaning, how much do customers spend on apps, less percentages sent to the app store owners? The consistent feedback I've gotten from all Android and iOS developers is that iOS customers are willing to pay more. (Apple announced they've given $2.5 billion to developers at WWDC. I can't find the corresponding Android number.)
I imagine the number for Android lying significantly lower, because a) it's a lot harder to pay in the Android market and thus b) more apps are ad-supported. But I don't think you can ignore the market share trends in favor of how much money devs get on each platform today. Google is already working to get carrier billing for apps to more countries, so buying apps on android will get easier. Given the huge android userbase, it might soon be very smart to put in the extra effort of programming for Android (especially as you'd be one of the first to do so).
As a developer, what's relevant to me is the addressable platform.
Here the comparison is between a bunch of android phones with a mind boggling matrix of hardware and OS versions... to just one of the iOS devices.
Having ported an app between the iPhone/iPod and the iPad, and having done the transition to "retina" resolution, the fragmentation in the iOS universe is about as much as I'm willing to take.
Is there a single hardware & OS combination for android that is comparable to the size of the iPhone & iPod touch, iOS 4.x installed base?
I really don't know, and have no idea where I'd go to find out.
The thought of trying to support an android port of my apps, with the seemingly lower return on investment that the android application stores seems to give doesn't seem profitable.
* Everything is sized relatively, but the only way to size to a % of the screen (that I've found) is to pad a view with empty views with different weights, and set the middle view to 0dp (density-independent pixels, which, because of some manufacturers' lies and trickery, aren't always density-independent) tall, and have it resize later. But wait! Setting it to 0dp messes up other aspects of resizing!
* The order of operations that Android goes through to resolve layouts, if it's even logical, is incredibly opaque, and at the very least, not at all intuitive. For example, denoting a view "A" to be above another view, let's call it "B", is not the same as denoting view "B" to be below view "A". Now try that with four views, arranged in a T formation. Hellish! And good luck trying to resize an image to clamp its left, top, and right edges to the screen, and crop it at the bottom - it won't work unless you clamp only a corner (i.e. top and left) then have it resize to fill the third clamped dimension, that is unless you're using other special tactics to mess around with other parts of your layout, in which case you'll waste a LOT of time finding the right answer, or one good enough to use.
* The concept of resource overlays in Android is a huge, huge, huge pain in the ass. Possibly necessary given the complete fragmentation of the devices.
* Devices will actually lie to you about their screen dpi/resolution because they think it'll be better
* Some devices might have bad defaults, or not allow you to select a button without tapping it (i.e. with a directional pad) while others will.
* Weak-linking and adding in checks for future functionality is not possible, to my knowledge, on Android. Adding in support for Honeycomb features entails actually not supporting them directly, but proxying them through a compatibility library.
* The error-checking for XML layouts and themes is weak.
* XML layouts and creating views in the equivalent of a view controller is entirely different and the mapping is not 1:1. Combining the approaches piecemeal complicates the whole process enormously.
* Asynchronous data can only really be loaded one way without causing lower-end devices to crash on large datasets, and that is with the whole cursor/content provider ecosystem, which is a poor excuse of an abstraction given Java's power.
* Parsing stuff tends to be dog-slow unless you spend an inordinate amount of time paying attention to it.
* Certain upcoming platforms running Android - and developed by Google itself - don't even support the NDK, which means you can't even dip into C/C++ for performance anymore for said platform.
God, I miss developing on iOS. It's too bad our app got rejected for using In-App Subscriptions, then rejected for not using In-App Subscriptions.
I understand the frustration of getting a rejection from Apple, it probably wouldn't sting as much if they had better bedside manner. When it happened to me, I was livid for about 5 minutes, thinking it was actually due to a bug on their end. Then I investigated it and discovered that it was actually my mistake, and didn't feel so bad. But a little less terseness and I wouldn't have had that initial anger because I would have correctly understood the reason for the rejection.
I appreciate greatly the long list of issues you just presented. Despite the tone of my previous post, I was on the fence about android.
I'm dismayed to hear that google doesnt' seem to be supporting the NDK as much going forward, as one of the alternative solutions I'd considered was using the Unity engine. Unity is a game engine, but it can be used to make just about anything you want, and you could concievably do a regular, say, business app in it, with the advantage that the same app can be produced for multiple platforms, including iOS and android.
It seems to me, the way to support android would be to do a web app. Presumably the browser, being based on webkit, works and is reasonably targetable. But that limits android as a platform to situations where a web app works as a business model.
To be clear, the NDK will probably remain supported and first-class on mobile devices. Given that I have an NDA for the current Android device I'm targeting, I can't say anything really specific about it, only that the NDK is not designed to work with it (though it would appear that it does support JNI). So I wouldn't discount Unity necessarily.
I have half a mind to just write up a new UI framework in OpenGL or something, and use it as a vehicle to learn OpenGL better, but I don't have the time or the money to do so, and ultimately I can worth with the stuff that's already there, albeit with constant frustration and platform angst.
Nah, I used a bold for a week (while I was developing an app for it), and it was unbelievably bad. I couldn't find a single thing to like about it, however the most unbelievable thing is you have to reboot the device every time you install an app.
Except that Windows vs Mac was something like 95% to 5% in favor of Windows, while the smartphone market is likely to end up more like 60% to 30% in favor of Android. The situation is different qualitatively.
The data consistently shows that iPhone share is growing, just not as fast as Android.
One thing I don't get though is that Android phones aren't very low margin. Their retail price is just as high as an iPhone (or at least close). Even feature phones aren't cheap.
So do non-iPhone phones not get subsidized at full retail pricing (or generally much more substantially than the iPhone)?
With the exception of my gadget geek friends ponying big money for the latest 4G-whatever, everyone I know who has an Android phone got it on a two-for-one special or nearly free discount. These huge Android growth numbers aren't being driven by the $300 mega phones.
Cost of the handset is fraction of the overall 2 yr contract price with data plans that are must for these devices. I know people are eager to label Android as "cheap" and "commodity" but the reality is that there are hugely popular Android handsets in both premium and low cost segments and it isn't clear at all that all of the sales are from low end handsets.
Similarly Apple sells $49 3GS - so does Apple now become a commodity/cheap brand?
iPhones get a much bigger subsidy from the carriers. This can be deduced from the ASP that Apple, HTC, RIM etc report. iPhone ASP has always been $600+, while HTC, RIM have ASPs around $300-400 (Samsung smartphone ASP is even lower). This can also be seen by looking at contract prices outside the US. For example, in the UK all phones can be had free on contract, but the monthly amount you pay for an iPhone is much larger than for a top of the line Android (see the O2 or Vodafone UK sites).
The reason this is not reflected in the contract-less prices is because US carriers have a very strong incentive to inflate them to force you to choose contracts.
Actually, in your link above, iPhone 4 prices start from $859. $719 is the price of the 3GS.
I don't know how it is in Australia, but the contract price discrepancy between Android phones and iPhones is well known in England. For example, O2 sells the Galaxy S2 for free with a 24 month £42 plan, while the 16GB iPhone 4 is free on a 24 month £67 plan.
The Galaxy S2 plan gives you a bit more data, and you do have more flexibility with Galaxy S2 plans - you can choose to pay more for the phone and less for the plan for example. (Of course, you also have a big choice of cheaper Android phones too).
$80 android phone right there. I assume that's lower margin than, say, the $200-300 iphones that Verizon sells with a 2 year contract.
Apple is culturally stuck to high margins. Google cares only about making sure Apple doesn't win and the other handset makers are used to pretty lean margins...
Androids will keep getting cheaper-- there'll be free/near-free ones out there soon.
But my point isn't the price the customer pays. But rather the price the carrier pays to HTC/Samsung. That's the money that the actual OEM makes. Those prices, if they're equal to the non-contract price, aren't that far off of the iPhone. Even feature phones are routinely $150 or so.
Nobody ever posts facts to back that up. They just assume it would be true. But HTC and Samsung are making a lot of profit on their Android phones, much more than they ever did with other mobile OS.
The issue is that Android can be used on any hardware product whatsoever, so inevitably there will be both premium and more commodity type products that cover all market segments. Virgin Mobile already has non contract Android smart phones that retail (no rebate) for $150, far cheaper than an iPhone.
I'm not sure that's right. I think it's better to characterize it as high margin low market share premium offering vs everything (high, low, middle). Android's strength is exactly that it doesn't target anything and caters to every single demographic.
It's easy to make a program for windows run ok on XP and brilliantly on 7 (I assume, never tried, that you do something like target net 3 or something else M$ have backported). It sounds like you can't be so successful with the old android phones, even if you tried.
Not necessarily. iOS already surpasses Android in mobile OS market share, and Android isn't making any inroads into tablets and other mobile computing devices, which will probably be the bigger market than smartphones.
It won't be a bigger market than smartphones, not even close. There are 5 billion phone subscriptions in the world right now. They will all be replaced by smartphones.
EDIT: Also iOS growth is slower than Android growth, still, so it's just a matter of time before even iOS numbers get beaten, with or without Android tablets.
"There are 5 billion phone subscriptions in the world right now. They will all be replaced by smartphones."
Not saying I disagree but I am saying you have to be careful with blanket statements like this. I recall Olympus stating that phones were simply incapable of competing with digital cameras, regardless of market. However the market has shown that phones eat into the low end market and the SLRs are pushing down from the top putting a lot of pressure on the mid-range market.
I could imagine that the 'phone' function as an adjunct to all tablets. All you need is a headset and voice dialing and your tablet can go VOIP/Cellular as the channel availability demands. Services like Gvoice making the endpoints number vanish by overlaying it with a 'logical' phone number.
Its not a huge step to cannibalization of the smartphone market by the tablet market.
It's a very person to person thing. I carry both a smartphone and a tablet with me everywhere and I find myself never using the phone unless someone actually....phones.
Depends on your definition of "everywhere". I don't even walk the dog without throwing my phone in my pocket first. Would you always walk your dog with your iPad?
That's a good point, although in fairness I actually have walked my dog with my iPad, I was reading the Economist. However to the point, it requires a 'different' holding. It certainly isn't something you put in a pocket but if you tend to carry a bag around it's light enough to throw in there, around the house generally the tablet is 'near by' but my phone is always on my person.
I'll grant you that most will eventually end up with smartphones, if for no other reason than the phone manufacturers will simply stop making "dumb" ones. I personally prefer a "dumb" phone but I can see the writing on the wall.
Given the rather horrible options for data here in Canada, saying that smartphones will replace phones isn't quite true. I'm disinclined to get a smartphone w/o a dataplan, and I'm not sure they would sell me such. This might change, but it sucks today...
I was an original droid owner. I didn't want to switch to AT&T, as I had dropped them years before for a variety of reasons. Everyone I knew got iPhones, and I stuck with Verizon and was happy with my droid. Two months (or so) before the iPhone was released on Verizon, my droid essentially died (left side of touch screen unusable which rendered the phone useless). I got a Droid2. At the same time, I got my non-techie fiance a DroidX.
Right after acquiring those two phones, Verizon announced iPhone. So...I returned them at the 30 day mark. Went to some old phones we had for a month or so and then got the Verizon version of iPhone a few days before everyone else.
I DO NOT like the iPhone. My fiance also DOES NOT like the iPhone. I will be giving mine to our teenager in a month when I have an upgrade available and she will be giving hers to another kid a few months later with the next upgrade. I will immediately go back to an android phone, and most likely a Droid. Why?
1. Unexpectedly - the droid battery life sucks. That was the major reason I wanted an iPhone. But, I'm willing to deal with it. In fact, when I actually USE my iPhone, its battery life isn't substantially better (but still better). But it's not enough for ME.
2. I am just old fashioned I guess - I like the physical keyboard. In its absence, I like swipe. For me, it's just faster to get my emails/sms messages sent. Forget the keyboard - it's a preference thing. I can get a device on android WITH a keyboard or WITHOUT a keyboard. I like the options!
3. Google Maps/Navigation is SPECTACULAR on Android. It's not even comparable on iPhone. I'm sure I could purchase an iPhone app to make my experience better...but I refuse! The android app is free, it's awesome and with the various layers it's just something that I can't live without. I'm very directionally challenged and that app is a lifesaver that I don't want to live without.
4. Little indicator light telling me I have something new. Stupid, right? That little light saves me from having to unlock the phone and see if I have something that's new or not. The notification system is just better.
5. Email - I can't (or I don't know how) to reply to an email on the iPhone and add an attachment.
6. I used my droid WAY more for voice search and voice navigation. I NEVER used voice in other areas of the device, such as txt messaging - but I LOVED it for certain things and I just don't do it on the iPhone. Why? Don't know! I bet it's there - somehow. For me, it's just not part of the experience.
7. File/Photo transfer - it was so easy with my droid. Plug it in to my PC - copy! DONE. I could even copy from my PC back to the phone and it figured it all out. With iPhone, it seems I have to do everything through iTunes. iTunes is slow as hell on my PC. I hardly EVER sync the phone via my PC for this reason.
8. I don't recall (and maybe I'm wrong???) ever having to delete voicemail on my droid to free up space.
I have more reasons I'm sure - these are off the top of my head. In the end, it doesn't really matter. If people are still replying to this thread, I'm sure some will give me an equal number of reasons why the iPhone is better - or even challenge some of the reasons why I loved my droid. At the end of the day, I'm going back to the android platform. I LIKED IT BETTER! I don't REALLY regret switching, because it allowed me to form my OWN opinion of the two platforms and come to my own decision.
This is relevant to this conversation because I would PAY the same, or more, for an android phone over an iPhone. That's MY preference, as a techie, and that's my fiances preference - and she is definitely NOT a techie. I have very close friends who just don't get where I'm coming from - that I must be crazy...to them - enjoy your iDevice. I'll soon be back to enjoying my android device!
That physical keyboard thing is a huge deal with women with nails (nails don't trigger the iPhone screen).
While iOS catching up on the notification system, you're right about the defaults being somewhat better on some android phones for people (sync/maps especially).
If you don't like apps (sounds like you don't), it's a tossup which phone you'll like better. iOS has a better browser, sync is better on many (but not all) android phones, the lack of a physical keyboard is daunting for many, especially women with nails.
If you just take pictures with the default app, mail, text and use the default maps app, the higher quality camera in many droids can make it a better device for you. It's really only when you get into apps themselves (especially 3rd party apps) does the difference hit you. You and your fiance do not sound like app people.
That said, if you want to make your phones suck less till you get new ones:
Install PhotoSync to copy your pictures over. Don't even need to plug in.
Install navigon to make driving directions better
If you want new notifications now, either install a GM seed (not recommended) or jailbreak (a bit of a pain if you're getting rid of the phone), there are lots of different much better notification schemes on there.
I think the more interesting number will hit when the next generation iPhone shows up and, if history is a guide, Verizon gets an "entry level" iPhone. If Apple is able to produce a phone that Verizon can do the same deal AT&T is doing (free + 2 year contract), then we will get a real feel for what the trend will be.
Nokia might also finally get a boost in the US market thanks to Microsoft's help.
Look I know there is this perennial argument that somehow it just can't be true that people actually want Android phones and there must be some external reason why not everybody is buying an iPhone. At some point you've just got to give it up : people buy Androids because they want them. They want them more than iPhones.
No, I know people who wanted the Android phones, and I expect a market for Android phones. I know quite a few people who still like Blackberry and have taken the "free" phone when AT&T was offering some BB models that way. I want to know the % of the audience that is in the "I don't care" category and would take an iPhone if it were the free phone. I expect that some people might have and older iPod and think of this as a cheap replacement.
(no clue on the down voting - seems like you cannot even imply free is a factor)
Isn't it odd how the media always compares an entire operating system platform to one phone? When iPads and iPod touches are counted, iOS far surpasses Android. It's weird for them not to count mobile operating systems as a whole and instead focus on a single type of device they run on.
You keep stating this (in this thread), but it's not that simple.
Apple has sold 200m+ iOS devices in total (June 2011[1]). This includes around 60M iPod Touch's and 20M iPads[2]. There have been over 100m Android devices sold (May 2011[3]).
In the phone market, the typical contract is around 2 years, and the iPhone has been around a lot longer than Android. A larger number of the iOS devices sold are no longer in user than is the case for Android (simply because it has been in the market longer).
This can be seen by things like iOS vs Android usage statistics, where Android is about to pass iOS (note that this includes all iOS devices): http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201006-20110.... I'd be surprised if iOS stayed ahead of Android this year in usage, even including the iPhone 5 bump.
I could be wrong, but if I am then it would be a weird thing to do - it would mean that Statcounter doesn't list iPad usage anywhere (eg, the other browser-by-version graphs exclude mobile Safari)
For the last three days: iOS = 19.98%, iPhone = 15.14% , iPod Touch = 4.76% , iPhone + iPod Touch = 19.90%.
The difference is only 0.08% of mobile usage, so either they don't count iPad usage as part of Mobile at all and that's just a rounding error, or they count it as drastically lower than the 1% (of all browsing, not just mobile) that other sources are quoting for iPad browser share.
Actually, you can tell they do count iPad as part of the normal, non-mobile, browser graph. It's small enough that it gets bundled into "Other" on the browser versions graph, but if you download the CSV data it's called out separately, currently at 0.73% of all browsing and the total they give for all versions of Safari combined wouldn't add up unless they counted the iPad versions in with the desktop versions.
Yes, sounds counter-intuitive, but the OSes (the platforms) are used extensively on things that are quite a bit like phones but aren't exactly phones. They're used so much so, that they change the market share picture.
They run all the same software. For 99% of programs, if they work on the phones, they'll work on the non-phone items (however sometimes less well). This goes for android as well as iOS as well as blackberry
His sentence makes perfect sense. You just need to level up and put some points into reading comprehension. Go talk to the dudes with the giant yellow exclamation marks over their heads. That will help.
Additionally - meditate on the following koan: if a vendor builds a platform, and nobody builds a device for it, will it still be hyped by the tech-press?
It's not weird. The media needs to sell media and will skew, manipulate or otherwise deliberately misinterpret any given data set to get the story they want.
In the end everyone is trying to jockey into position for an exclusive, invite, PR person to call them back, etc.
Media in general is a dance between control and access. PR people manipulate it to get good coverage, and the reporters feed it to get good exclusives.
Someone just got an invite to the next Google launch.
That is all.
*I should note, I played this game very, very well at a label.
This is phone only share. Accounting for non-phone use, it's not even close, android is still behind.
iPodTouches are very popular replacements for gaming platforms for children/young adults (crowding out the nintendo DS), and there is the iPad, while blackberry/android tablets aren't doing well (Galaxy tab had a 16% return rate).
As others already pointed out, this article is specifically about smartphone market share in the US.
But I'll be sure to mark down on my timeline of knee-jerk reactions that the debate is now about total OS install base across any category of device. I guess it's time to cross the "only on one carrier" argument off; I haven't heard that one in a few months.
Not to be too obvious but that would be why the article has the word SmartPhone in its title as it's discussing phone share only, not general mobile device market.
"Android Pummels Apple and Blackberry in Smartphone Supremacy Race" is a bit disingenuous when you look at periods when apple did not release a new phone (when most of their sales occur) nor compare the actual platform (iOS) which all three providers now have a tablet form of (Playbook, Honeycomb, iPad).
I find it histrionic and misleading. It's saying "Guy murdered in knife fight" to find out the one guy walked up and stabbed him during a short afternoon nap, and oh, he's not dead, just still in bed.
Verizon started carrying the iPhone in February, so there was a fair bit of time till this data was compiled. I'd be surprised if there's a change in direction the next time data is released.
StatCounter has mobile browser usage (which includes all iOS devices)[1]:
Symbian: ~33% (it's big in Asia, and still has a large installed base)
iOS: ~20%
Android: ~18%
BB: ~12%
Note that this is only browser usage, which obviously doesn't correspond to total sales well. Symbian is still way ahead of anything else in that measure.
The only market share numbers I've seen recently that included non-phone devices were straight from Apple (so feel free to take it with a grain of salt if you'd like). They have iOS at 44%, with Android at 28%.
Historical market share: http://i.imgur.com/Aj7og.png Change per month: http://i.imgur.com/2qIqH.png
One thing to consider is that these numbers are market share, they don't show how the overall pie is growing.
(By the way, Comscore wants you to pay for historical data so they wouldn't like this being posted publicly, but I've been collecting this data from their press releases.)