Posts by Martin Hill

People don't want tablets, they want iPads

Predictable indeed

Thomas, where'd you get the idea the Android App market is getting to be bigger than Apple's?

There are still only a couple of hundred Android tablet apps versus over 130,000 iPad apps.

Of course scaled-up phone apps just don't cut the mustard and even if you do count them, there are still far fewer Android phone apps, 45% of them are spamware and there is still only 10% the number of top tier game apps on Android.

Also Apple does not sell the iPad at a premium. Remember when the entire industry was shocked when Apple introduced the iPad at half the $1,000 they were expecting. Well competitors are still struggling to beat Apple's price particularly when they have to put in twice the amount of RAM because Android is far less efficient at using RAM than iOS.

Then there are Apple's enormous enconomies of scale and headlock on component supplies and you wonder why no-one can compete?

-Mart

One per cent of world's web browsing happens on iPad

The iPad's share is 40% larger than Android though

The iPad's share is 40% larger than all Android devices put together.

Add in the iPod touch and the iPhone and you find that iOS is 3.65x larger than Android.

That is the revolution.

-Mart

@m gale

Your smartphone blinkers are still on Mr Gale. Both the Statcounter and iosnova graphs only count half of the iOS platform. You just can't accept the fact that iOS is far larger than just the iPhone can you?

If you're going to group devices by operating system then stop conveniently leaving out half of the iOS operating system platform.

If you only want to compare smartphones, then compare Motorola, Samsung, HTC and the Apple iPhone individually against each other. The only reason to group them together by operating system is to compare the App and browsing platforms and if you do that, you HAVE to include all devices that run those operating systems.

Just because Apple has obliterated all competitors of the iPod touch in the mini-tablet market for the last 4 years and all iPad competitors in the last year and a bit in the tablet market doesn't mean you can conveniently ignore those segments when comparing operating system platforms.

-Mart

Not according to this graph

Here is a graph of web share of all iOS devices vs all Android devices over the last 10 months:

http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=9&qpcustom=iOS,Android,Linux&sample=29

As you can see, iOS is currently at 2.63% which is 3.65x greater than Android at 0.72%

A month earlier, iOS was at 2.38% vs 0.76% for Android which was only 3.13x as larger than Android.

Notice that Android has actually lost 0.04 marketshare points. Android has dropped 5%, while iOS has increased its share 10%.

The StatCounter graphs you are so fond of quoting are not counting all iOS devices. However, Net Applications is comparing all devices when it compares operating systems (as it should).

Again, you need to take off the smartphone blinkers. Both Android and iOS run on tablets, mini-tablets and smartphones and the vast majority of apps run on all of them (most iPad apps are universal and thus also run on iPod touches and iPhones and of course smartphone apps are almost all that is available for Android tablets).

However, when all is said an done, both of these web metrics firms are only counting web page visitors. The most accurate data comes from the likes of NPD, IDC and ComScore who actually count unit sales and do surveys of end users and all of these analytical firms confirm that Android has lost around 6% marketshare sequentially in the USA in the last month while the iPhone has surged by 40%. Likewise ComScore reports that the number of active iOS devices outnumber Android devices in the USA by 59% and in Europe by 116%. See my post on the previous page for more detail of these stats.

Face it, the days of Android's rapid ascension are behind it - Android has now plateaued and even lost share in some segments.

-Mart

Yes, Android is plateauing

@Steve Evans,

Yes, Android is plateauing with the global sales growth rate of Android devices droppiing to 3 percent in the March quarter from 7.5 percent in the fourth quarter and 9.5 percent in the September quarter.

IDC reports that Android's share of the US smartphone market in dropped for the first time from 52.4% in Q4 2010 to 49.5% in Q1 2011, a drop of 2.9 points or 5.5% quarter to quarter.  In contrast, the iPhone gained significantly larger share going from 17.2% to 29.5%, an increase of 12.3 points or 42%.

NPD agrees reporting that Android's share of quarterly sales in the US smartphone market shrank 6% quarter-to-quarter in Q1 2011 to 50%.  In contrast Apple's iPhone grew 47% to capture 28% of all smartphone sales in the USA.

IDC also reports that Apple had the highest growth of any mobile phone vendor worldwide in Q1 2011 year over year of 115% with second place ZTE growing 45%, Samsung growing 9% and HTC and Moto not even on the chart.

And these figures all include Android tablets because the vast bulk of them also include cellular radios and carrier subscriptions.

In contrast, Apple's figures don't include the iPod touch or iPad (which the analysts should do when comparing operating systems), which when added in show iOS and Android to be neck and neck in quarterly unit sales.

Of course in terms of installed base Apple is far ahead of Android with 200 million iOS devices sold versus only 100 million Android as confirmed by ComScore who reported in April that *active* iOS devices outnumber Android devices by 59% in the  USA and by 116% in Europe.

-Mart

We are comparing operating systems

@m gale,

As usual, Android boosters only count the iPhone and compare it against all Android phones, tablets and mini tablets as you have done with those Statcounter stats.

However, if you are going to group all those devices together by what operating system they run, then you need to group all iOS devices together - the iPhone plus the iPod touch and the iPad. When you do that you see Statcounter's graph shows the same increasing dominance of the iOS platform that Net Applications shows.

Take the blinkers off, mobile operating systems are bigger than just the small smartphone segment.

Leavingcout half of the iOS platform in your comparisons is as bad as only counting laptops when comparing Windows against Linux and Mac OS X.

-Mart

iOS web share now 3.65x bigger than Android

Lost in all the noise is the fact that Net Applications also reports that iOS now has 3.65x the worldwide web marketshare of Android with 2.63% vs 0.72%.

The interesting thing is that this represents a 6% increase over last month when the iOS share was 3.4x larger than Android.

Yet another sign that Android's growth is plateauing while iOS just keeps getting bigger.

-Mart

Behind Apple's record sales are signs of desperation

Actually, it is Android that has peaked

"Apple itself is hovering precariously at the top of the curve"

Actually, it is Google that is now "hovering precariously at the top of the curve" as Android sales growth in percentage terms is plateauing (thanks to bigmig for the analysis):

May-June 2010: +60% per month

June-August 2010: +12% per month

August-December 2010: +11% per month

December-April 2011: +4% per month

Part of the plateau is because total sales have grown larger. However, even in unit terms the growth rate has slowed considerably:

May-June 2010: +60,000 daily units per month

June-August 2010: +20,000 daily units per month

August-December 2010: +25,000 daily units per month

December-April 2011: +12,500 daily units per month

In contrast, Apple sold 18.7 million iPhones in Q1 2011, up 15% from the previous quarter which is impressive considering the post Christmas quarter has in the past been flat at best for iPhone sales.

-Mart

iPad propels Apple into top-three PC vendor placement

Of course it is a PC

The iPad is indeed a Personal Computer. Have a look in any dictionary and you will find a personal computer (PC) is defined as any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and price make it useful for individuals in contrast to terminals running off a mainframe or mini computer.

Microsoft classes the iPad as a PC as Steve Balmer is on record as stating as do analysts DisplaySearch and Barrons in addition to Canalys. All analysts considers tablet PCs to be Personal Computers and everyone considers tablet PCs like the HP Slate to be direct competitors in the same market as the iPad.

The iPad has a bigger screen than most netbooks which most definitely are classed as PCs and the iPad happily runs powerful word processing, desktop publishing, painting and photo-editing software, spreadsheets, databases and video editing apps in addition to of course email, web browsing and desktop-class games at least on par with the capabilities of netbooks.

You can connect an iPad to a data projector and do powerpoint-compatible slideshows (using Keynote), and now print wirelessly to a growing number of printers.

Many commentators have indicated how the iPad has replaced their notebook PC for a majority of tasks and most analysts are on record as stating that the iPad has cannibalised laptops and netbook sales and you can only "cannibalise" something that is of your own kind.

Some argue that because an iPad needs to be connected to another computer for system updates means it can't be classed as a PC despite the fact that the iPad can download media, apps and other data independently over the air. However this is splitting hairs as you would then have to discount the millions of PCs that are sold as Point of Sale terminals or factory floor boxes completely dependent on a server to function as well.

Yes, the iPad is a PC and Apple is indeed now Number 1 in PC retail computer sales in the USA and number 3 in computer sales worldwide.

As far as whether smartphones are PCs or not, that's when the lines get distinctly blurry. :-)

-Mart

Coder Android love (nearly) matches iPhone lust

Nope, Android does not match iPhone love

These survey results are not at all representative of iOS developers as a whole as the vast majority use Apple's Xcode to write iOS apps, not the software sold by the company that ran this survey.

Appcelerator's survey subjects are part of a small minority of developers who are using the Appcelerator Titanium cross-platform development environment which is used in 4,000 iOS apps, which amounts to only 1-2% of the 300,000 apps in the App Store. Appcelerator not that long ago was banned from the iOS App store as were other cross-platform environments so what is surprising is that these particular devs were not far more negative towards Apple.

A previous study a few months back by AppStore HQ of every published iPhone, iPad and Android developer currently in the Apple App Store or Android Market demonstrated that there is only a tiny percentage of developers engaged writing software for both Android and iOS:

iOS developers = 43,185

Android developers = 10,199

iOS & Android devs = 1,412

As only 3% of iOS developers targeted both iOS and Android, it is quite inappropriate to assume that these cross-platform Appcelerator customers represent the views of the much larger iOS development community.

By buying Appcelerator's software these developers were already planning on developing cross-platform and thus represent a completely biased sample which cannot be extrapolated to the rest of the iOS dev community.

Other data strongly suggests the opposite of what Appcelerator reports - that iOS continues to garner far more dev interest than Android because that is where the money is. For example, Larva Labs found that "Overall we estimate that $6,000,000 has been paid out to developers for games, and $15,000,000 has been paid out on apps. That is a total of $21,000,000, nearly 1/50th the amount paid out to devs on iPhone. This really indicates how much of a cottage industry the paid Android Market remains, with insufficient sales numbers to warrant full-time labor for paid content."

Then there is AppBrain's findings that over 45,000 of the 100,000 apps in the Android Marketplace are spam apps.

As such, these survey results are not very useful at all.

-Mart

Pundits predict plunging iPad market share

or like Plays For Sure beat the iPod?

Yep, that 70-80% marketshare captured by the iPod and the iTues Music store for the last 9 years against the massed ranks of the open platform of "Plays For Sure" ecosystem Microsoft, Sony, Dell, HP, Creative, SanDisk etc etc and the massed online music and media stores from even the Music Cartel themselves against as well as bricks and mortar stores such as WallMart put the lie to this meme.

"Open" does not by any means always beat a "closed" vertically integrated ecosystem.

-Mart

Apple ambushed in Barcelona

Plays fer Sure all over again

Yep, I reckon this will be as successful as the Plays For Sure alliance of all the major mp3 player manufacturers and the Music cartel which totally obliterated the iPod and the iTunes Music Store.

Oh wait....

-Mart

Microsoft's answer to MobileMe goes public

MobileMe works these days

Mobileme was indeed crap when it was launched, failing to do very simple synch tasks. Definitely not Apple's finest hour.

Fast-forward to today and it is rock solid for me now. Ascylto, have you tried it recently?

It's great having all of my Safari bookmarks and iDisk volume synched between my home Macs, my work Macs and my iPhone amongst it's other features. Very nice online Ajax environment for webmail, photo galleries, movies, website, contacts, etc as well and the integration with programs on the Mac like the iLife suite is pretty good.

Not to say it is perfect yet - could definitely do with a few more features to justify the price, but I'm pretty happy with it these days.

-Mart

The iPhone App Store - a classic protection racket

Re: There are a lot of people missing the point

Anonymous Coward said:

"On top of this, Apple also gets to decide what applications are allowed to be sold. They are already blocking applications from smaller developers that compete with applications from their "preferred" partners, completely blocking companies from selling legitimate products."

By the way, I should have said I do agree that it is not good that Apple is blocking some apps that appear to compete with some of their apps such as the podcasting app and the email app. Mind you, they did allow about 3 other email apps, so perhaps their reason that the rejected email one was badly coded was in fact legitimate.

The podcasting app may have been rejected because of concerns with bandwidth usage, something that would have been prompted by the carriers. Other mobile app platforms will also have to contend with this.

However, the dropping of the NDA was an excellent first in loosening the reigns as the iPhone/iPod Touch App Store matures, as was only allowing reviews of apps by people who actually purchased those apps, so here’s hoping other quirks and issues will also be ironed out as time goes by.

-Mart

Re: There are a lot of people missing the point

Anonymous Coward said:

"Most of the comments seem to be missing the point of this article"

I'm afraid you're missing the point of most of the comments.

"The problem is that Apple prevents the developers from selling via any other channel"

On the contrary, Apple is not preventing developers from using a different channel. There is nothing stopping them from developing and selling their apps on Android Marketplace or Microsoft MarketPlace, RIM, Symbian etc. You see Apple is not a monopoly like Microsoft, there are quite a number of other viable mobile platforms out there for developers to target if they want to do something Apple or the carriers restrict.

The point with developing for the iPhone is the attraction for customers and developers alike that it is a one-stop-shop. This is the major selling point and heck it certainly seems to be working damn well. Only half a dozen apps have fallen foul of Apple’s restrictions out of the 6,000 apps available on the store, so that’s not a bad record.

“And if Apple decided it wanted to change the ration and take 70% for itself and give only 30% back to the developers”

I’m sorry but everyone knows there is no way Apple would do this. Apple sells hardware not software. The iTunes Music Store proves that in no uncertain terms (5 billion songs sold and tracks are still 99c each no matter how the Labels scream and complain).

“Anyone who thinks this is fair and equitable (let alone legal) has Mr Jobs so far up their *ss their vision is distorted”

Of course it is fair and legal and you’re the one with the distorted vision. The iPhone is not the only smartphone platform in the market. Do you think it is legal that Microsoft is the gatekeeper of all software on the Xbox platform (or the Zune platform) or Nintendo on the Wii and GB platforms or Sony on the PS etc? Of course it is – they are specific business plans and if developers don’t like it, they go to a different platform (desktop PC gaming for example).

Now if the iPhone had say 90% of the smartphone market, then you would have a case for potentially monopolistic practices. That is why MS was successfully prosecuted for abusing its monopoly position in stamping out competition on desktop PCs.

-Mart

Whoops...

Oops, I meant to write that each app purchased from the Apple App Store can be installed on up to 5 iPhones or iPod Touches. (not "up to up to 5 Macs or PCs"!)

-Mart

*sigh*

I know I shouldn't bite considering this is one of El Reg's poorer efforts at trying to sensationalise a non-issue, but I just can't help myself.

Before the iPhone App Store, mobile developers had to pay sites like Handango or individual cell provider portals anywhere from 40% to 70% for the privilege of being listed (Microsoft charged Windows Mobile developers almost $500 and 50% of sales for example). However, in many cases, the developer had to handle the credit card transaction fees themselves, often the web hosting fees, security certificate signing ($1,000 per app in some cases) and advertising etc. In the end, very few consumers actually used these sites (it was all too hard and unfriendly – ever tried going through the hoops to download and install an app on a Windows Mobile phone?) and developers had to charge large prices to try and get enough income to make it all worthwhile.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/08/06/inside_iphone_2_0_the_new_iphone_app_store.html

Once their apps were made available, because of the high costs, their apps would often instantly be pirated.

Then there were the problems of having to target thousands of different hardware models and even OSes (Symbian is fragmented into 3 different and incompatible systems for example) and usually end up writing for the lowest common denominator (this is going to be a problem with Android as well).

With the App Store, Apple covers all costs: web hosting, credit card transaction fees, there is no need to spend $10,000 or more setting up with VISA or similar, and Apple’s built-in Fairplay DRM and decent pricing model means their software is just not pirated.

Customers get far cheaper prices than any other mobile app store, are protected from malware, can install each purchased app on up to 5 Macs or PCs (so no need to pirate copies for family members), and developers are making a killing. If a developer wants to put their app up for free and make money on advertising or through other means Apple charges zero, zip, nada, nothing (doesn’t sound like the Mafia to me?).

Because of all these advantages for both developers and customers, both are flocking to the store. App Store purchases over the first 1 month:

$30 million spread over 60 million downloads.

http://valleywag.com/5035431/jobs-iphone-app-sales-hit-30-million-in-a-month

Extrapolate that out to the 200 million apps Apple says were downloaded by Oct 8, we're looking at $100 million dollars income, $70 million of which is going to developers. Not bad for the first 3 months of the App Store's existence.

Apple was experiencing about one million dollars worth of App Store purchases per day during the first month and that figure is of course just growing with more and more iPhone (and iPod Touch) owners coming on board every day.

As a result, Apple has wiped all other mobile app stores off the map as in a whole year the competition combined only managed 150 million downloads.

So I’m sorry, the iTunes App Store is not the Mafia – it is more akin to Robin Hood, robbing from the rich (cell provider walled gardens and Microsoft) and giving to the poor (developers and consumers).

-Mart

SanDisk guns for iPod Nano with slim video viewer

Not very nice

So Chris Morrison, do you have anything constructive to say on the topic or will you just stick to personal attacks?

-Mart

Specs comparison

Hmm, the Sansa View has a 25% bigger screen and longer battery life than the new iPod Nano (7hrs vs 5hrs of video playback could be handy though do you really need more than 24hrs audio playback?) but at the cost of being 35% thicker and 67% heavier. Considering this is a market segment particularly sensitive to size and weight, these are fairly big disadvantages.

The Sansa has an FM radio and voice recorder (both optional add-ons for the Nano) but has no games, calendar and contact synching, notes or an online store with 6 million songs, hundreds of TV shows, movies, or hundreds of thousands of free video and audio podcasts.

The Sansa with it’s proprietary 30-pin connector also lacks the huge 3rd party ecosystem of 3,000 speaker systems, clock radios, arm bands, cases and other peripherals or the dock-connector integration (often with steering wheel controls) in the majority of new cars on the market today or aircraft dock integration etc.

And it comes priced from 16% to 55% more expensive than the 8GB iPod Nano. They may be gunning for the Nano, but their attempt probably falls short in too many areas.

-Mart