The curious case of slowing US growth for Android

There are 310 million people who live in the US and not everyone in that 310 million is a target customer for a smartphone (young kids, older folks, people who just don't like cellphones).

Based on nothing but common sense it seems fairly obvious to me that growth will continue but at a slowing pace -- the market isn't saturated, but much of the low-hanging fruit is snatched up.

At least when walking into a Verizon store, your perceived choice was android or android; everything else is plopped into a corner. I wonder if they will be successful in converting the remaining feature phone customers by simply removing that option in the future.

Is the same thing happening on other carriers?

As the Android phones get cheaper and cheaper, they will invade the low-end mobile phone segment in masses and gain some further additional growth from there. But only some.

The thing is, when nearly everyone, including non-computer-savvy people, has an Android phone, it becomes an infrastructure in itself and in its own ubiquity a platform never seen before. Just think what you can do with that if you're a service provider.

1) the iPhone's availability on Sprint (Oct 2011)

2) HTC revenue dips 30% (November 2011)