Android 95.2% market share in South Korea | Hacker News Reader

Android 95.2% market share in South Korea

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I suspect that a major cause for people to ditch their iPhones will be to do with availability of Korean-translated and Korean-localized apps.

Now that Android has been given a comfortable lead, local developers won't even bother writing or porting local apps for iOS.

Language and cultural siloing is the reason non-English-Western markets can be so dramatically different to English-Western. If anyone wonders why Samsung is investing so much energy into Bada, it's because they want to try and win the OS race for themselves, and there's still few Asian markets where the opportunity still exists.

iOS looks fine for korean mindshare:

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=android%2Ciphone...

Were I to infer anything from that data, it would be that "mindshare" is not a significant metric. 95% market share, and near parity in "mindshare?" That smacks of irrelevancy to me.

My point with the data is that the claim of 95% market share is probably not accurate.

I seriously doubt the accuracy of these stats. South Korea's web services are largely insular and just for South Korea. It well known that foreign websites have much smaller market shares of pageviews and users than domestic Korean sites. There is a Korean clone for almost every major website presently available and they are usually made by existing, large Korean companies with advertising and media budgets to get numbers away from foreign competitors. Given the deliberately isolationist nature of so many internet companies here, you cannot get accurate stats for usage unless you have their stats.

I know this is anecdotal but the majority of people I see on the bus have iPhones. iPads are probably on par with Android tablets though. iPhones are huge here. Almost everyone has or wants a smartphone which usually means an iPhone mainly due to the perception of Apple as a luxury brand and luxury brands being so overwhelmingly popular.

Very interesting, thanks for the insight. I want to note that there is still value to this data. Although the coverage may not be accurate (covering all users), it sounds like it is precise (covering a very specific subset of users that access foreign sites, which StatCounter tracks). The fact that these users have moved so dramatically to Android in just 13 months says something.

Is there a pro version of StatCounter that gives absolute figures, to see if there has been a dramatic change in tracked users over this time period?

Having some background with Korea and living there, I also strongly doubt the accuracy of this report.

The market share doesn't seem to be for total user base, but for new sales. So even if there is a user base of 40% iPhones there, it's declining fast and trending towards 5%, because the sales for last month show 5% iPhones sold and 95% Android phones sold.

If that's for sales, would it not be quite predictable that iPhone sales are dropping when a new model is anticipated in the next few months?

I know this is anecdotal but the majority of people I see on the bus have iPhones.

I noticed virtually the same last time I was there in 2010. But one thing I'll never underestimate is the power of trends in Korean purchasing patterns. Once something gets popular, everybody has to have it, no matter what it is.

PPK (of QuirksMode) breaks down these StatCounter mobile browser share stats and explains them in his blog post here: http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2011/08/mobile_brows...

Also of note, this month Android jumped past Nokia into 3rd place globally and Opera is close to losing its lead.

What's strange is that last month Nokia's Symbian had the largest share by OS globally.

PPK also has some country-specific breakdowns for Q2 of this year here: http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2011/08/q2_2011_mobi... that shows that in the UK (where I am), BlackBerry is in the lead.

When developing mobile apps or sites that have a global market, it's important to realize how varied the mobile OS and browser landscape is.

What's more interesting is that, at least according to that graph, iOS market share has gone from 40% down to next to nothing in less than a year.

That's likely the market growing and diluting iOS' market share.

Or noise in the data. Like if Samsung has a standard app or widget that pings a statcounter site every 15 minutes.

The original source: http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-KR-monthly-201007-20110...

The result for China is also very interesting:

http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-CN-monthly-201007-20110...

I bet the [unknown] is some home-grown android derivative.

The unknown in China is UC Browser, which is a proxied browser where the rendering is on the server side. http://www.ucweb.com/ Generally used as a replacement for symbian.

These are also interesting views on the South Korea data:

http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-KR-monthly-201007-201107

http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_vs_desktop-KR-monthly-2010...

That's desktop browsing (93% for IE) and desktop vs mobile (massive rise from 0 to 15% for mobile in last year).

So if these figures are right then in the last year Android browsing has gone from nothing to double all non IE browsing.

Slightly less dramatic stat here, but still reckons it's 70% Android in terms of sales in the most recent months: http://thenextweb.com/google/2011/06/22/android-powers-70-of...

I was just in Seoul a few months ago and I saw about equal numbers of iPhones vs Androids. And as a mobile developer I pay extra attention to these type of things =)

The percentage of people who even have smartphones in SK seems far higher than the US. It's difficult to find anyone without an iphone or android.

Anyone got an authoratative link as opposed to a link to a reddit thread which links to an imgur.com screenshot of this supposed results?

This highlights how much iPhone is tied to local carriers. South Korea is a market leader in mobile technology. Making it there means a lot in terms of the global marketplace. (Then again, I used to say the same thing about Japan.)

No it reflects national pride.

Samsung and LG are both Korean, and I bet that 95% figure is mostly those two companies.

There is no official Apple retail store in South Korea--only resellers. This may be part of the reason, too.

How much of an effort has Apple directed at marketing to South Koreans? In Japan, most of the marketing push came not from Apple but from the official carrier - Softbank.

For a lot of people I know, the lack of marketing on the Android front is why they switched from Softbank to AU. These friends of mine are not technically oriented so marketing plays a big factor in term of what they know about phones. On the other hand AU is really upping their game.

Yep.. a guy in my office is helping AU get free wireless points for their users into stores (cafe's, bars etc.) for 8万 a pop.. pretty sweet little side biz.

Marketing would help a lot in South Korea. Quite a few singers and musicians have even preformed songs for LG and Samsung.

I really doubt the statistics as I expressed in another post. There is an almost uncountable number of iPhone re-sellers here in Seoul. There are 6 in the street outside (within about a 100 metre range of each other). Apple is very, very popular here. I suspect the statistics are munged from website data which does not correlate to a representative population sample.

I would probably say iPhones are very popular in South Korea. Over several extended visits there, I have yet to see a Macintosh, of any sort, in the wild.

I believe that approval of the iPhone was held up until Samsung had their Galaxy out in the market over there[1].

"Many customers who have been weighing which smartphones they should buy are turning to Samsung's Galaxy S as the release of iPhone 4 is being delayed," said John Park of Daishin Securities. Samsung said it had sold 500,000 Galaxy S phones in South Korea alone in the 33 days since it went on sale in the local market..."

[1] http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j8mylIu-T...

The Galaxy S was out in South Korea the same day as the iPhone launched globally (and had been launched elsewhere a couple of weeks earlier), so it's incorrect to say that the iPhone was delayed until the Galaxy S was out, though obviously any delay is still an advantage.

That's internet-browsing phones share.

I reckon there's still two orders of magnitude more Nokia Series 40 handsets out there in the wild. Especially in places like China.

Still in the UK, there's a surprising number of Series 40 handsets floating around on the streets, even helf by owners of HTC's and iPhones "incase they go wrong".

What is even more impressive is that there are only a few active cell phones in North Korea that aren't Android powered.

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