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Comment by bonch | Hacker News Reader

Isn't it odd how the media always compares an entire operating system platform to one phone? When iPads and iPod touches are counted, iOS far surpasses Android. It's weird for them not to count mobile operating systems as a whole and instead focus on a single type of device they run on.

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You keep stating this (in this thread), but it's not that simple.

Apple has sold 200m+ iOS devices in total (June 2011[1]). This includes around 60M iPod Touch's and 20M iPads[2]. There have been over 100m Android devices sold (May 2011[3]).

In the phone market, the typical contract is around 2 years, and the iPhone has been around a lot longer than Android. A larger number of the iOS devices sold are no longer in user than is the case for Android (simply because it has been in the market longer).

This can be seen by things like iOS vs Android usage statistics, where Android is about to pass iOS (note that this includes all iOS devices): http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201006-20110.... I'd be surprised if iOS stayed ahead of Android this year in usage, even including the iPhone 5 bump.

[1] http://www.appleguider.com/article/wwdc-2011-200m-ios-device...

[2] http://www.razorianfly.com/2011/04/19/apple-outs-q2-sales-fi...

[3] http://yourmobilesite.net/100-million-active-android-devices...

The gs.statcounter.com stats for iOS only count "mobile" devices, i.e. it excludes iPads.

I've seen this mentioned elsewhere, but I can't see anything on the Statcounter site that confirms it.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-ww-monthly-201006-... breaks browser usage for iPod and iPhones out explicitly, and the sum of those both is less than the total iOS usage in http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201006-20110...

I could be wrong, but if I am then it would be a weird thing to do - it would mean that Statcounter doesn't list iPad usage anywhere (eg, the other browser-by-version graphs exclude mobile Safari)

For the last three days: iOS = 19.98%, iPhone = 15.14% , iPod Touch = 4.76% , iPhone + iPod Touch = 19.90%.

The difference is only 0.08% of mobile usage, so either they don't count iPad usage as part of Mobile at all and that's just a rounding error, or they count it as drastically lower than the 1% (of all browsing, not just mobile) that other sources are quoting for iPad browser share.

Actually, you can tell they do count iPad as part of the normal, non-mobile, browser graph. It's small enough that it gets bundled into "Other" on the browser versions graph, but if you download the CSV data it's called out separately, currently at 0.73% of all browsing and the total they give for all versions of Safari combined wouldn't add up unless they counted the iPad versions in with the desktop versions.

Actually, no. As stated in the headline, this is a report on smartphone market share.

It's about the smartphone platforms.

That's the thing: It's only about phones. If you look at smartphone platforms you have to include the non-phone items.

     If you look at smartphone platforms you have to 
     include the non-phone items.

Dude, read that sentence you just wrote again.

His sentence makes perfect sense. You just need to level up and put some points into reading comprehension. Go talk to the dudes with the giant yellow exclamation marks over their heads. That will help.

Additionally - meditate on the following koan: if a vendor builds a platform, and nobody builds a device for it, will it still be hyped by the tech-press?

Yes, sounds counter-intuitive, but the OSes (the platforms) are used extensively on things that are quite a bit like phones but aren't exactly phones. They're used so much so, that they change the market share picture.

They run all the same software. For 99% of programs, if they work on the phones, they'll work on the non-phone items (however sometimes less well). This goes for android as well as iOS as well as blackberry

It's not weird. The media needs to sell media and will skew, manipulate or otherwise deliberately misinterpret any given data set to get the story they want.

In the end everyone is trying to jockey into position for an exclusive, invite, PR person to call them back, etc.

Media in general is a dance between control and access. PR people manipulate it to get good coverage, and the reporters feed it to get good exclusives.

Someone just got an invite to the next Google launch.

That is all.

*I should note, I played this game very, very well at a label.

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