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Scoobes on 23 September 2012
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ebw said:
Kasz216 said:
ethomaz said:

My ex-girlfriend have a Android too... when she changed to iPhone was one of the times I saw her happiest in life with something electronic, she marveled at every new thing she did with it... so epic.

Sorry guys for end-user: iOS > WP >> Android.

For greek:  Android >>>> All.

It's like Windows vs Linux.


If that was true... I'd think marketshare would be reversed.

The thing is, marketshare is reversed when you eliminate the one big factor that skews the numbers toward Android.  The problem is that carriers have a huge influence on people's choice of phones.  A large bulk of sales come from customers who come in to the phone store and just buy whatever is pushed onto them.  Anyone who believes that 60% of the world consciously picked Android is kidding themselves: compare the sales figures with actual usage statistics which show iOS well ahead of Android.  The simplest explanation is that Android is becoming the new "dirt cheap" and most owners use them as dumbphones, never even bothering to learn how to open web pages.

Incidentally, I suspect carrier intervention is also the reason why Windows Phone struggles to get any traction even with its stellar reviews.

Let's now take a look at a market that is (largely) free from this bias: tablets.  Tablets do not come attached with lucrative locked-in contracts, so the wireless carriers are not a significant source of tablet sales.  How do Android and iOS compare there?  The best-selling Android tablet is Kindle Fire, running an hugely outdated version of the OS.  Unfortunately Amazon is closed and refuses to release any sales data, but estimates suggest the iPad is holding a >60% share all by itself against a tide of inferior Android tablets.

(Oh, and anyone who really thinks proprietary connectors and closed systems are horrible, isn't much of a console gamer.  What percentage of this site does that describe?)

You analysis is somewhat skewed considering the same situation was present when Android first came out on smartphones. It's only been around 2 years since Android tablets became available. In the same time period, the market share of smartphones (iOS vs Android) was similar to what we're seeing with tablets and it's only recently that tablets like the Kindle Fire and Nexus 7 have really started to push the Android tablet market. It may take longer on tablets for the reason you mention above, but it seems likely that Android tablets will overtake iPad in terms of market share.

The one big difference is that this time Microsoft are going to throw a spanner into the works by releasing Surface but I think this is more likely to compete with iPads (higher end market & business users) then the best selling Android tablets (smaller, cheaper, 7" tablets).




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