Considering its available on many carries with many varying types of hardware and that verizon has had a buy 1 get 1 free deal since the droid phones launched, I think its highly doable.

Since the other thread was locked, I'll re-iterate what I said here.

I'm surprised it happened this quickly, but most of the credit goes to Verizon for aggressive promotion and 2-for-1 deals. RIM used a similar approach for big marketshare gains last year (hi, superchunk!).

I agree with mrstickball that growing the software marketplace is the biggest challenge for Android right now. Their second biggest challenge is building a worldwide market presence, where Apple still seems far ahead.

No matter how sweet their deal with AT&T, Apple should seriously consider opening up their carriers in the US. Locking themselves to just one carrier has clearly left a huge opening for a strong competitor like Android to exploit.

To give an impression of how much catching up Android still has to do, here's a chart that shows that the iPod Touch alone still sees more usage than Android. Though it wasn't that long ago that Android was sitting below WinMo. Android will probably overtake the Touch in a month or two:

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=8

Take that apple.

We don't really know if Google or any of the handset manufacturers are making a lot of money from Android. We do know that Apple is making a ton of profit off the iPhone. I have a feeling that the average iPhone user buys more apps and content than Android users.

No. Still not possible.

Again, Android sold about 8-9 million units worldwide through Q4 of 2009, compared to no less than 50 million for the iPhone, worldwide. If Android actually outsold the iPhone's LTD install base, we would be hearing a lot more.

Difference is the 8-9m was over 4 months ago, 4 months of being on a carrier who has over 90m users that was offering bogo free deal the entire time on multiple adroid os based hardware.

Also consider that the 50m+ iphones are easily 60% rebuys from older iphone hardware. There are probably only about ~30-35m unique users WORLDWIDE. So for NPD, the US only figure is probably ~15-20m and that is definitely doable for android phones.

WW, iphone surely still leads, but in US, thanks almost exclusively to Verizon's huge push, droid is probably king of the #2 position behind blackberry.

EDIT: after thinking about it more, my 60% rebuy is probably low. Its probably mroe like 80% or more. Most iphones sold now are simply people annually buying the new model to replace their older model. Whereas nearly all of the android based phones being sold are to new users who either had no smart phone or used a winOS/palm/bb.

EDIT 2: I am probably really close for iphone users in US. Neilson says only 7m as of June 2009.

http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/iphone-users-watch-more-video-and-are-older-than-you-think/

Considering the bogo offer and that at best iphones have doubled over the last year, Android OS could easily be higher in total active users.

Google wins again.

Now that Google has a bigger marketshare than Apple, should Nintendo consider Google an enemy of the future?

If you pay for NPD, how much information do you get?

You make a lot of assumptions.

http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/4/comScore_Reports_February_2010_U.S._Mobile_Subscriber_Market_Share

In February, 25% of American smartphone subscribers used iPhones, and 9% used Android phones. Do you think the Android user base has tripled in the last two months?

Android is growing fast. There's no need to grossly exxagerate how well it's doing.

Until Canalys or Gartner publish OS data for Q1, 2010, I don't think we're really going to find any solid answers as to how much Android moved during the quarter.