Replies

One thing this chart is wrong about is that it lists the market share of Android as being ALL smartphones. . . but nothing could be further from the truth. In the trial between Apple and Samsung last year, Samsung was required to reveal their mix of products and their capabilities. It turns out that the Number one seller of Android phones was selling of its Android product line only 35% could have been considered to have been in the smartphone category, yet the Android line is always reported as being monolithically a smartphone OS. Many of Samsung's phones were either Feature phones which, while running on Android, only had pre-loaded software and were incapable of loading additional apps from the Android Play Store or any other source, or were other Android phones that did not even have functionality beyond basic phone, internet, mail, camera, and messaging. . . similar to phones before the smartphone revolution.

Many of the other Android phone makers make only Feature phones, only basic phones, and a few make only smartphones. . . but to say that ALL Androids are smartphones competing for the same market as Apple for the same customers is false; it just isn't true.

For example, Xiaomi, the current market leader in China makes a mix of Android dumb, feature, and smartphones (which are copies of iPhones) but it turns out that they could grab the Chinese market through low price leadership (and making smartphones that looked like iPhones in both exterior and UI screens) but also by achieving their low prices with the simple expediency of not paying royalties and/or licensing for the any of the cell phone technology they are using in their phones. When they attempted to move into the India Market in the last quarter, the legal system in India discovered this and has banned and confiscated their products pending infringement litigation from quite a few companies, including Cisco, Microsoft, Nokia, and others, whose intellectual property has been allegedly appropriated without compensation by Xiaomi.

The other distortion is that it is comparing one company's OS, Apple's iOS, against hundreds of others in the case of Android (Approximately 225 to be more accurate) and less than a dozen in the case of Windows phone. Other refers to only a couple of OS makers such as RIM and Samsung's new OS which is failing.