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Android and iOS continue to carve up the world
- xutopia 14y agoI think the most fascinating trend here is that people are not purchasing anything but a smartphone nowadays.
- MatthewPhillips 14y agoFascinating considering data costs. It's hard to buy a dumb phone from a carrier nowadays though.
- coob 14y agoWhich is why a higher percentage of Android phones are not used as smartphones as compared to iOS.
- MatthewPhillips 14y agoSource? At least in the States, you can't (easily) buy a smartphone of any kind without signing up for a data contract.
- manmal 14y agoBrowser usage has always been low for Android vs. iOS: http://mobilesyrup.com/2012/06/04/android-trails-ios-in-mobile-browser-usage-despite-market-share-growth/ http://mobilesyrup.com/2012/06/04/android-trails-ios-in-mobi...
- MatthewPhillips 14y agoWhat does that have to do with the grandparents comment?
- manmal 14y agoBrowser usage is an indicator of "using a phone as smartphone", no? It even says so in the article.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- lesterbuck 14y agoYes, the forced data plans are irritating. I bought a used unlocked phone from another carrier and activated it on the target carrier. Their database has no a priori knowledge that my IMEI is a smartphone, so no data plan is forced on me. WiFi data works great, though, and I disable all the other data connections to avoid accidental data charges.
- enjo 14y agohttp://www.virginmobileusa.com/ http://www.virginmobileusa.com/ Hell you can buy an iPhone through them.
- w1ntermute 14y agoThe last time I checked the local Verizon retail store, they didn't even have any dumbphones in stock - the only way to get one was to order online.
- Shivetya 14y agoBased on contract costs I really think the names are reversed. I know I did not obtain a smartphone until work agreed to pick up the monthly costs. The number of people who have them sometimes boggles my mind. I have friends and relatives for whom it is a major expense. People are paying quarter to half what they would pay on a car not for these phones.
- scottkduncan 14y agoI pay about as much per month to insure my car as I do for smartphone service and personally feel that I get more value out of my smartphone than I do out of my car. In fact I frequently find myself weighing the pros and cons of eliminating my car in order to save on recurring costs - this never enters my mind for the smartphone.
- clarky07 14y agoAgreed. While I have no plans on getting rid of my car, my phone is easily a more valuable and useful tool. Of course, I work from home as an iPhone dev, so you can take that with a grain of salt :-)
- awakeasleep 14y agoHahah I never thought how weird this was. I live in a city, split the car with some loved ones, and almost resent the cost. I can't pay enough to upgrade my instant effortless global communicator and sudoku machine though.
- Retric 14y agoNahh, there just ignoring non smartphone sales they still make up 1/3 of the ~419.1 million global quarterly cellphone sales. http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=2017015 http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=2017015
- msy 14y agoAs a developer I think the stats that matter are % of web traffic and app sales, which at least from the last I've seen dramatically lag total android handset sales. That may change but my anecdotal experience are that a lot are sold as upgrades without people really engaging with the additional functionality where as iPhones seem to be an intentional choice for that additional functionality.
- myko 14y agoDon't be fooled, I know quite a few people (generally older, 50+) who got their iPhones as upgrades and didn't even realize they had browsers until I showed them.
- jusben1369 14y agoI guess the point is though that if you look at Apps sold and web traffic then you're eliminating users from both platforms that may own the phones but aren't really engaged.
- stephengillie 14y agoLarge groups of people, even technical people, still see these pocket-sized computers as "the thing in my pocket which forces me to speak with people", and just want to ignore it.
- jay_kyburz 14y agoI hate when my phone rings.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- coob 14y agoDon't be fooled by your anecdote vs. actual stats.
- ThePherocity 14y agoI just picked up my first Android phone on the weekend (Galaxy S3), and some parts I really love. Widgets change the way I use my phone. But compared to the iPhone, it's far less intuitive, it's build quality is crap, and I can't make it though a day on a charge. I wish there was another phone maker that had the polish of Apple with the freedom of Android.
- MikeKusold 14y agoMost likely the reason that it can't make it through a day without a charge is because of 4G/LTE. If battery life is that important, you can force your phone to only use 3G and you will see much greater life.
- ThePherocity 14y agoI'm in a city without LTE yet for this carrier, so that isn't it. Haven't installed any apps that should be background intensive either. I used to stream music all day from the iTunes match and still have more battery than what I have just listening to previously downloaded music.
- gman99 14y agoAll the more reason to turn off LTE in the phone. Not sure how the phone is configured, but it's entirely possible the phone is using up battery trying to find non-existent LTE towers unless it's explicitly disabled (but I do agree with you in that battery life in most of the android phones is terrible)
- ThePherocity 14y agoHeh, okay, thanks, it's done. I'll see if it improves.
- ljf 14y agoOdd - I found the inverse when going to iPhone (unintuitive and low battery life), from android. With my Galaxy Note, the battery life improved, considerably after 5 or 6 charge cycles.
- kunle 14y agoI have a hard time thinking this matters. 68% of smartphones worldwide are Android devices. Close to 70% of profits from smartphones worldwide go to Apple (http://www.bgr.com/2012/08/06/apple-mobile-industry-profit-share-q2-2012/ http://www.bgr.com/2012/08/06/apple-mobile-industry-profit-s...) which doesn't make Android devices. On pretty much every metric except eyeballs, Android is losing (including the value of eyeballs - advertising doesn't matter if the people seeing your ads cant pay for your product), so why does 68% of market share matter?
- hahainternet 14y agoI have no idea how you think this is a relevant point. Clearly people seeing Android ads can afford to buy Androids, as they have 68% market share. Profit only matters if you own Apple. I'm more concerned with the variety of options I have as a consumer, and the competition between manufacturers driving them to produce better hardware.
- mtgx 14y agoIt mattered for Microsoft. Once it had 90% market share, every other OS/platform became almost irrelevant in the consumer space.
- wklauss 14y agoI think that was an odd situation that had a lot to do about how software was distributed and consumed then. Even if Android keeps gaining marketshare -lets say it gets to 70/75%- I don't think this will play the same way as Mac/PC did in the 90s. Most of what people do these days with a computer / phone is platform agnostic (web browsing, for instance).
- tesseractive 14y agoThis involves a pretty dangerous assumption, which is that the current methods of monetizing phones are the only ones that matter -- and it sounds as though you're trying to make an even more unpleasant assumption, which is that wealthy people are the only people that matter. This is Hacker News -- a site for people who set out to build things that don't exist yet. the ability to target 68% of the world's smartphone-using population seems pretty interesting to me. For example, consider an education platform, as Nicholas Negroponte attempted to with the OLPC project. Whether there's monetization or not, there might be an interesting opportunity there. Open your mind a little. Not everything is about the profit-making horserace.
- stevenwei 14y agoAre there similar (recent) numbers for tablets yet? I am curious whether the Nexus 7 & Kindle Fire are putting a dent into the iPad's domination of the tablet market.
- Apocryphon 14y agoDoes this mean that Android is the Symbian of this generation of phones?
- enjo 14y agoAndroid's growth was completely predictable for anyone who was intimately familiar with Symbian. I'd say that Android is much more the "Series 60" of this generation. It's the same model (albeit more open) that Nokia rode to market dominance.
- spiralpolitik 14y agoWhat would be interesting to see is how that 68% is sliced. How much of that % has access to the official Google Marketplace, How much of that % are non Google approved phones etc. Those numbers give would give developers a better sense of what the potential market size is like, and help identify gaps in the market. The Android share is somewhat like the DOS market at the beginning of the nineties. While DOS commanded a sizable share verses Mac OS, it was broken down into 3 variants (MSDOS, DRDOS, PCDOS) with sub versions (MSDOS 5, DRDOS 6 etc). While they were mostly compatible they had enough differences to cause developers headaches.
- diminish 14y agowhat would really be interesting to see is how much of ios browsing comes from ipads; cause iphone screen is quite small to do anything; forget browsing
- bobbles 14y agoA lot of the browsing that I do from my iPhone is via either the AlienBlue reddit app or viewing HackerNews through the Pulse app. As they strip everything out of the web-pages except the text content (most of the time) it makes reading stuff on the web pretty decent.
- DonnyV 14y agoYes but how did MSDOS at the end of the game make out? .....yes market share matters.
- spiralpolitik 14y agoMSDOS technically won out because Microsoft married Windows and MSDOS together to get Windows 95 killing off the other DOS variants (and the alternative Windows shells like Norton) in the process. Also remember that Apple's reward for losing was ending up the most profitable PC vendor so things didn't end up so bad for them.
- pjmlp 14y ago