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Comment by bikitan | Hacker News Reader

I think Japan is going to be one of the first markets to see laptop sales dry up almost completely. Most people are fine with their iPhones. Where I work, all developers use macbooks and everyone else uses a thinkpad. A lot of other laptop models, like a lot of tech in Japan, is targeted at the Japanese market only. Dynabooks are the budget windows machine of choice at the moment, it seems. Although most young people choose Apple whenever possible anyway.

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Really not trying to start an OS war but for the sake of accuracy Android is the dominant mobile OS in Japan, not iPhone.

If you aren't trying to start a war, please provide a citation to back this up so there can be no dispute.

3rd party citation after searching "dominant OS Japan" in google https://www.statista.com/statistics/260415/market-share-held... Android 64.6%

Looking at the pattern: if the statistic would end in autumn instead of summer, then iOS could also have come up on top.

How can market share dramatically swing between 30% and 60% like it's doing in this chart?

Is this bad data? Is the market expanding & contracting so greatly that existing users are a minority of future marketshare?

> How can market share dramatically swing

You pay for results?

The data is bad.

I have a lot of insight into the apps side of things, and Android is somewhat smaller than iOS in Japan, both on revenue and downloads.

Most android phone owners don't use it as a smartphone - it's a cheap feature phone they buy at the phone store and they just use it to make calls on. The number of true 'smartphone users' in the android world who are using them to browse the web and download apps is comparable to or less than the number of iOS device owners.

> Most android phone owners don't use it as a smartphone - it's a cheap feature phone they buy at the phone store and they just use it to make calls on.

Do you have a source for that?

Yes - see above.

Where?

This data looks bad and not in line with other reports:

https://deviceatlas.com/blog/android-vs-ios-market-share-201... http://techjapan.tumblr.com/post/42142826707/why-iphone-mark...

According to our internal data which tallies tens of millions of app store installs on Android vs iOS, iOS both gets more downloads & revenue than Android in Japan.

You have posted a link about web browsing and another from 2012.

Do you gave a reliable report about marketshare because all reports tells that iOS have way less market share than Android in Japan

I dont know why the data looks that wonky, but the graph that business insider uses (taken from Kantar) shows a similar pattern. http://www.businessinsider.my/apple-v-android-market-share-b...

This is from last year, so could have changed, but Q4 2015 web traffic was 66% iOS vs 34% Android in Japan:

https://deviceatlas.com/blog/android-vs-ios-market-share-201...

If you are selling phones, Traffic /= market share. There is good reason to believe that iPhone users use more traffic. They are the premium phone and their users spend more. Similarly, app installs are also not market share for the same reason.

There is even an argument that handset sales isn't market share, that the only real measure is to survey some people to see exactly what phones they own and use. That's the only way to include old phones that aren't used for much other than making calls.

Would traffic not be a good indicator of the parent's argument about that the iPhone is a replacement for a laptop? Based on the assumption most computer usage is internet-dependent now (a stretch, but not completely illogical), then a user with an Android device not connecting to the internet would probably need another device to do so?

What % of laptops in Japan do you think developers buy?

Japan has, by G8 standards, always been very PC wary. Where American kids would have a computer, Japanese kids would have a console. Where American kids finally got a laptop, Japanese kids had moved on to smart-phones.

I'm not sure if Japan is ahead of the curve or on a whole different curve altogether. If there's any modern country more full of contradictions, I don't know of one.

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