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Report: Android is New Smartphone Market Leader; Passes Apple, RIM
Google posts an amazing 886 percent year-to-year growth in sales
When Google’s Android mobile OS launched it was met with skepticism, pessimism, and doubt. Slowly but surely, Google recruited new hardware partners, launched new handsets, eventually reaching sales of 65,000 units a day — then 100,000. And Google maintained a relentless pace of OS releases — with such high profile updates as Android 1.5, 2.0, 2.1, and, most recently, 2.2 (Froyo).
Now market researcher Canalys claims that Google is now the top player in the U.S. smartphone market in terms of market share. According to Canalys’s extensive study, Google owns 34 percent of the market compared to Research in Motion’s 32 percent and Apple’s 21.7 percent.
Propelled by wildly successful handsets like HTC Hero (October 2009), Motorola Droid (November 2009), HTC Droid Incredible (April 2010), HTC EVO 4G (June 2010), and Motorola Droid X (July 2010), Google has dominated the market with an astounding sales growth of 886 percent.
Perhaps the only analogy to what Google is doing in the history of operating systems is Microsoft’s incredible conquest of the personal computer operating system market with Windows. Much like Windows, Google’s multi-hardware OEM, open approach, focused on providing customers with a broad array of choices, is crushing its more specialized competitors, like Apple (which ironically was similarly crushed by Microsoft in the PC OS market).
That’s not to say that Apple or RIM are posting financial losses. In fact, Apple grew 61 percent in sales year-to-year and RIM grew 41 percent. What is happening, though, is that they appear to be missing the growth opportunity that Android has found with its open, third-party hardware model.
Android’s success looks especially scary considering that it appears to just be getting warmed up. Android 3.0 “Gingerbread” should launch this holiday season with some pretty amazing new features. Motorola, HTC, and others are reportedly already cooking up new high end handsets to accompany the OS launch.
In terms of individual hardware OEMs, Nokia still is the dominant party, owning 38 percent of the market. Overall smartphone sales rose 64 percent on a year-to-year basis.
Google’s multi-hardware OEM, open approach, focused on providing customers with a broad array of choices, is crushing its more specialized competitors Great. If he's right, then mediocrity will win again in the phone market.
Android 3.0 “Gingerbread” should launch this holiday season with some pretty amazing new features.
I just don't see anything even rumored about 3.0 to be anywhere close to "amazing." It's going to get WebM video compatibility and, wow, the copy/paste may not suck like it does now. Rumored is an answer to iTunes (already several store options out there), a better UI (yay, they've done that for the last couple releases), and streaming media from your PC (basically integrating SlingPlayer, which was recently released for Android anyway). Android 2.2 was a bigger release just for installing apps on the SD card, multiple app updating, Flash support, and JIT compiling (the latter giving a big speed increase).
Motorola, HTC, and others are reportedly already cooking up new high end handsets to accompany the OS launch.
They don't time phone releases with Android releases. If they did, the recent high-end Android phones would have been timed and shipped with Android 2.2, and none of them were. In reality, manufacturer-specific updates will be released months after Android 3.0 is released, hopefully, maybe, we hope so. Verizon won't even tell me if they'll release 2.2 for my phone I bought earlier this year.
...Google has dominated the market with an astounding sales growth of 886 percent. They are misconstruing this... Google is not making ANY SALES at all... they are GIVING AWAY the OS. There are no REVENUES AT ALL going to Google from the sales of these phones. Google intends to gain revenues from Advertising associated with users accessing websites and apps from the phones using Android OS. Strangely, the online presence of iPhones in July 2010 grew TWICE as fast as Android, according to NetApplications... and that's ignoring iPod Touch and iPads.
"Upon the version 4 release, the iPhone posted its largest single-month usage gain ever in July. This gain comes amid persistent reports of antenna problems. Global usage share jumped from .59% to June to .7% in July. In comparison, the May to June share was esssentially flat. However, this is a typical share pattern prior to the release of a major upgrade, since buyers hold off purchasing until the new releaseIn more good news for Apple, the iPhone grew usage share at over twice the pace of Android.
It should also be pointed out that a percentage of sales growth over last year is a meaningless statistic unless one knows the number of units sold last year. IF there were only 1000 units sold last year and there were 8860 units sold this year, they you can easily say there was an 886% increase over last year... but that is not so impressive when you know that there were only 1000 sold last year. Apple sold 8.4 million iPhones in the last quarter, when sales went flat in anticipation of the release of the iPhone 4, and 8.8 million in the preceding quarter, for a six month total of 17.2 million in the two slowest quarters of the year. Compare that to Google announcing as of the end of December 2009, that 8,450,420 Android phones, from all makers, had been sold since Android was release in October of 2008. 30% of 14.7 million is only 4.4 million... and 28% of 13.5 million (1st quarter US 2010 smartphone sales) is only 3.8 million... bringing the total to ~16.7 million Android phones sold worldwide... total, since October 2008. Less than what Apple sold worldwide in just six months. I don't think Apple is too worried.
Incidentally, in the iPhone's 1st year, they too posted growth figures in the same range...