Gartner: Android OS Sales Trumps iOS And RIM, Grew 888 Percent In 2010 | Hacker News Reader

Gartner: Android OS Sales Trumps iOS And RIM, Grew 888 Percent In 2010

techcrunch.com

18 pointssandipc13 comments

Here's to hoping we can go at least one of those posts without the brand loyalists coming out of the woodwork to "interpret" these numbers to their satisfaction...

How about we just agree that there is very stiff competition in the smartphone market and when that happens everyone wins.

You've got to admit that the rise of Android is pretty neat, though. Who would have ever thought that 300,000 Linux kernels would be shipped to people's pockets every day? That's pretty great.

And almost all the rest are Unixy too! I agree the competition is the best part, but I love to stand back and check out the explosion of Linux in the mainstream.

According to the Gartner data, 184k Android devices were sold daily in 2010 overall, but it isn't unthinkable that sales have risen to 300k a day. When Dan Rubin first tweeted about that number back in December, it sounded kind of fishy, but it may well be true now.

In any case, the mobile market is moving to *nix kernels. Android and WebOS have Linux kernels. IOS and Blackberry 7 have Unix kernels. (LinMo, Moblin, Maemo and MeeGo also have Linux kernels but are either dead or dying.) The odd ones out are Windows Phone and Symbian, both facing an uncertain future.

I think you're confusing Dan Morril and Andy Rubin. If you consider a graph of Android's growth, I have no problem at all believing that activations in December were 50% higher than they were in January.

On December 6, Andy Rubin wrote on the Google Blog: "Today, more than 200,000 Android devices are activated daily worldwide." [1]

Three days later, Andy Rubin tweeted "There are over 300,000 Android phones activated each day." [2].

Given the little time in between, the latter statement raised some eyebrows. But again, the smartphone market is growing like crazy, so it's not at all unthinkable that right now 300k Android handsets are sold daily.

[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/introducing-nexus-s-w...

[2] http://twitter.com/arubin/status/12727540783251456

That 200,000 figure had been quoted before though, by Eric Schmidt back in August (which is when Steve Jobs said "We think some of our friends are counting upgrades in their numbers." & "We think we are ahead of everyone.") so if any eyebrows were raised by Rubin using it again 4 months later then they were (or should have been) raised in surpise at Android sales plateauing, particularly after announcing 100K per day in May and 160K per day in June. It's not unthinkable that they're up to 400K per day by now.

It could well have been a simple typo or something intended to be updated to the latest figures that got missed.

That seems like a fair assumption. Most important to me, as a web developer, is that soon most smartphone users will have modern WebKit browsers on their phones. Whether the OS is Android, iOS, Blackberry or WebOS doesn't really matter.

I was listening to the Economist today and they pointed out an interesting fact ...

Apple has 51% of the profits in the smartphone market even though it only has 4% of the market share (remarkable because Nokia once had that same profit percentage but at 40% market share) ... that to me is a far more interesting statistic than these sales numbers which the media seems to be fixated on.

We've seen this script before ... it was the Windows OS vs Apple products ... the Android OS will eventually outstrip Apple ... of that I have no doubt ... what is interesting to me is how much profits that continue to accrue to smartphone phone makers because of their decision to use Android. So far it doesn't seem to be helping as much as I thought it would

PS: Link to the stat I talked about http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/10/30/iphone-4-of-market-50...

It's 4% (and 50%) of the phone market (and profit). The low end phone market isn't really were the action is and the stat is pretty misleading.

The iPhone is 17% of the smartphone market and about 40% of smartphone profit. I'd guess it is Nokia that's throwing that statistic out rather than RIM or Android but it seems hard to find that comparison because Nokia and Samsung straddle both markets.

It's unlikely any of the Android phone OEM's will make the kind of profit margins Apple is making, but they're clearly making a lot more profits selling Android smartphones than they were before Android.

The feature phone market is drying up. All the growth (and the profit margins) is in smartphones. So what is a company like HTC, Motorola, Samsung, etc. to do? Symbian has been on lifesupport for ever. IOS and BlackBerry OS aren't available to them. They could try to build their own smartphone OS... but what are the odds that'll be successful?

Basically they need Android or WP7 to survive. The profits in making Android or WP7 phones may be less than what Apple makes, but it's much better than any other alternatives open to basically every phone maker but Apple and RIM.

Which incidentally, like you noted is a lot like the situation has always been between Apple and everyone else in the PC market.

Any idea why iPads and iPod Touches are not included as mobile devices? The report states that smartphones are a subset of mobile devices, but only uses Apple's iPhone numbers when counting mobile devices. Using the term 'iOS devices' makes me think iPad and iPod Touch should be included.

I get the feeling that companies like Gartner are going to struggle for a while on reporting numbers. I would really like to see some numbers on devices (be they cellphones, tablets, or handhelds) broken down by OS version and average number of apps downloaded (free & payed). With the coming tablets, these numbers would be more useful for developers.

By mobile device they just mean mobile phone. Why they don't just say that I'm not sure. However...

If you assume iPod Touches are still 40% of iPhone sales (a number I see used often) then they're about level on sales in 2010, though Android's growth is still much higher.

There was something like 15 million iPads sold last year, though Apple themselves seem keen to separate them from the smaller devices, unlike Android which has blurrier boundaries. Some analysts have started adding those iPad sales to the PC stats they compile, maybe tablets will become big enough to have their own category next year.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com