Android outsells Apple 2:1

Whuh?

Can't you be arsed to read to the end of the article, or are you saying you won't have read it if you had known they were US figures? Surely if you want to draw lessons you have to read the whole article anyway so its irrelevant where the figures are?

Either way, putting them at the end means you read the whole article, so a win-win for the Reg?

smart phones OS

This is a comparison between the OS of the phones, not the manufacturers. So looking at non-smart-phones would be irrelevant.

In the US (where those figures apply), it's Samsung. Globally I it's still Nokia, though their swan-dive is in full progress, so probably not for long.

See for instance

http://www.asymco.com/hire-me/vendor-bubbles/

Title is Optional

Really?? Did you read the same article as me?

The chart shows OS not device... It's Apple's choice not to licence iOS to other vendors, and while they have a pretty healthy market share, they are not exactly growing.

tldr; "One phone OS sells twice as many as another phone OS"

Especially when you consider that the single phone takes ~55% of the total profit for the market segment. Yeah, keep on downvoting fandroids!

By "barely win" do you mean outsell 2 to 1?

In the interests of full disclosure I personally use Android but have no problem paying for Apple kit for my wife as that's what she likes. What I do have a problem with is people dissembling (aka "lying").

By all means point out that Apple's figures are very impressive given that they are made up of only 1 phone versus x number of Android models - I'll listen to an argument like that.

Resort to misrepresentation and I'll call you out for the idiot you are!

yeah, silly Apple

Quite a useful comparison

Per the text of the article, the figures show that:

(i) Android-aligned players dominate the market and Android's share continues to grow; but

(ii) not at the expense of Apple, which also continues to grow; whereas

(iii) RIM appears to be in decline.

This information is relevant and useful to us as IT professionals because the secondary markets (e.g., for application software) more or less break down along those same lines.

The comparison is not useless for the reason you think - they're talking about platforms, not phones. You don't know what the situation would be if there was a single Android phone like there is a single iOS phone - it wouldn't be the same, but it's a completely unknown scenario. That's not the issue though.

What you should focus on is the fact that this time of year isn't when Apple dominates - they're about to release a new iPhone so sales of the old one slump. Contrast with Android, which is relatively even throughout the year due to releases by many different manufacturers smoothing it out.

Have a look at the same stats in a couple of months time and it'll be a different story.

It's not worthless because of the diversity of each "ecosystem" but because one is more seasonal than the other. The only really meaningful comparisons are year-on-year, not month-to-month.

Haven't seen manufacturer comparisons more recently than June, but Neilsen's figures then showed Apple on top with 28% (same as now). Second were RIM and HTC, both with 20%. Given Android's growth, I'd be a little surprised if HTC aren't a couple of points closer now.

I thought at the time that Apple would have had a bigger lead.

It should be noted though that of HTC's 20%, 14% was Android and 6% Windows Mobile in its various forms. It could be that their Android growth is cancelled out by WM share losses.

http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/in-u-s-smartphone-market-android-is-top-operating-system-apple-is-top-manufacturer/

QuinnDexter: "consumers care more about the fact that it's a Samsung or LG or Sony Ericsson"

HTC & LG sell WP7 phones (Samsung just joined up) yet WP7 sales are still hovering around 2%. Apart from Apple (and Nokia in the near future) the manufacturer and the OS on the phone are orthogonal choices. People are choosing Samsung *and* Android, HTC *and* Android, LG *and* Android... they're conspicuously not choosing WP7, Bada, Meego, Symbian or any of the other 2nd tier OS's ;)

If HTC sells 70% of what Samsung sells then how much investment should you make in Symbian development?

It's not what consumers care about, it's what developers care about. Unless, of course, you choose a phone manufacturer based on how many other people choose that phone manufacturer.

The prevalence of each android version is also a developer concern (unless you want to go with the most popular instead of the most up-to-date version when you buy your new phone) and is available from the android.com site.

@ Dirk Vandenheuvel

And Big Macs ( no pun intended ) outsell cheaper organic apples

Beer also outsells Blue Nun.

It certainly does

and VHS also outsold Betamax

rounding

They're all rounded to nearest %. Suppose I have 3 firms with equal share, 33.3333% each, rounding to nearest I'd only get a total of 99%.

US data. Nokia's share is pretty much as it was...

These are US figures, where Symbian hasn't been a player for about five years. It wasn't iPhone that killed Nokia in the US, it a combination of a long-running dispute over CDMA patents with Qualcomm and then Samsung and HTC's willingness to do whatever the US carriers wanted (feature-stripping, lockouts, custom hardware), at a low cost.

Apple's arrival was well timed, as lots of makers were scrambling for the 30% share that Nokia was shedding in the US, but before you give Jobs credit for that, remember that 2007 was the first time that off-the-shelf silicon became available that would allow a non-phonemaker to make a complete GSM-compliant mobile phone (and that's also why the iPhone 1 wasn't 3G-capable).

Windows Phone 7 doesn't seem to be too hot, but last year's "other" included Windows Mobile and Windows Phone 7. Luckily Nokia are only commited to WP7 on "smartphones", and we all know how slippery it is to define a smartphone ;)

The comparison is OS's *on smartphones*, not OS's on any devices that'll run said OS's, so no we can't include other iDevices...

not the best survey

Comscore arguably have the best US handset survey out there, certainly it's a far bigger population, n=30,000

They show Apple down at more like 24% back in August-2010, but rising steadily since then. They got a big bump when they acquired got distribution through Verizon, and they've slowed in the last quarter, but it's quite possible we'll see them breach 30% with the iPhone-5.

Erm, no. The 'haters' you mean were presumably Apple haters. They said that Android would take share from Apple, but as the article makes clear, that isn't what is happening. Both Android and Apple are building share in the total handset market. Android is building it faster, so the smartphone segment is growing as a whole. As a result Apple is holding steady in smartphone share. The fact that they're holding steady in the quarter immediately preceeding a big product update is actually pretty impressive.

iPhone sales grew 143% YoY last quarter, the iJuggernaut is still chugging along pretty nicely.

Be careful what you wish 4...

Android is quickly becoming commoditized and with it will go the margins. Android is also being used primarily as a feature phone with marginal after market sales as uses are either unwilling or unable to buy apps and services.

If you're a developer who is providing software and/or services then the money is on iOS. Apple only sells 28% of the phones but pulls in almost 60% of all handset profit. Clearly, developers will follow the money.

If anything Android manufactures are barely turning a profit now. With Moto gaining favored status I see a lot of them jumping ship for Windows Phone 7. Either way Apple will be unharmed.

The perils of possession without utilization

http://www.asymco.com/2011/09/21/the-perils-of-possession-without-utilization/comment-page-1/#comment-32375

Biggest mobile loser? The non-smart phone

http://www.asymco.com/2011/09/14/biggest-mobile-loser/

A new view into the phone market

http://www.asymco.com/2011/08/05/an-new-view-into-the-phone-market/