iOS catches up to Android in December sales, thanks to iPhone 4S | Hacker News Reader

iOS catches up to Android in December sales, thanks to iPhone 4S

arstechnica.com

47 pointsshawndumas23 comments

...in the USA. That fact isn't mentioned anywhere in the article. You have to go to their source at neilson.com to find out that the market share they are referring to is confined to 4.5% of the world population.

So, these are USA numbers only. I wonder what the broader picture looks like?

To be fair, although USA might be 4.5% of the world population they account for the largest amount of smartphone sales of any country with about a third of all smartphones worldwide being sold in the U.S.

Oh, sure. But future growth at this point depends on getting non-smartphone users to upgrade- within the US, but probably more outside of it. That may well mean lower cost devices and PAYG phones- something that Android does and that (judging by what they've been saying recently) Windows Phone is going to be getting into.

Apple doesn't really seem too interested. I know they sell the 3GS for cheap these days, but it is old technology- compare the specs against something like the Nokia Lumia 710 (a decidedly entry-level device).

Latest global figures are all for Q3, the Q4 ones will be out in a month:

http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1848514

I'm all for tight competition since it keeps both Apple and Google playing their A game.

That said, I'm somewhat amused that anyone is surprised with these figures. The iPhone 4S was 6 months late. There were literally millions of iPhone faithful that were sitting on their hands eagerly waiting for the 4S so they could upgrade. If you stretch this chart back another 6 months you'll see a considerable sag in iPhone sales as the 4S waiting game began.

Android, due to it's constant upgrade stream, doesn't suffer from this cycle. Let's take a look at some yearly charts before we call this race...

> The iPhone 4S was 6 months late.

How do you figure? Apple announced it for October and released it in October. If you make the assumption that they wanted to release it in June or July, it's at most 3 or 4 months "late".

> If you stretch this chart back another 6 months you'll see a considerable sag in iPhone sales as the 4S waiting game began.

I'm pretty sure that iPhone 4 sales didn't slow down prior to the 4S's release. Not much anyway. Do you have anything to back up that claim?

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/09/iphone-4-tops-charts/

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/09/09/iphone_4_sales...

> Android, due to it's constant upgrade stream, doesn't suffer from this cycle. Let's take a look at some yearly charts before we call this race...

I agree. Let's go further. Why does it always have to be a race? If you look at the big picture instead of the versus battle portrayed by the media then Android and iOS are together leading the industry. And next in line is Windows Phone which consistently gets great reviews.

It's not all rainbows and unicorns. iOS suffers somewhat from being so locked down, but there are advantages to that as well. Android benefits from the immense range of devices that run it, but that also contributes to devices not getting upgrades. Windows Phone is not growing as quickly as many agree that it should based on its merit.

But overall everyone is doing well and customers are happy. Nobody is losing except some of the old dogs like Blackberry.

Perhaps, though the iPhone 4 and 3GS are the 2nd and 3rd best selling current smartphones as well.

Additionally, with the iPhone now available on yet another US carrier (Sprint), there's more people who can now buy iPhones. I know a number of Sprint (and previously, Verizon) customers who only had Android phones because they couldn't get an iPhone with their carrier.

I think that was only true in the launch month. I can't find the link right now but there was a breakdown by carrier and month that had the various Samsung Galaxy SII models back in 2nd place the next month.

http://www-bgr-com.vimg.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/canac...

I find single phone competing against a bunch of Android phones still impressive.

Which single phone do you refer to? The 3GS, the 4 (GSM), the 4 (CDMA), the 4 (Universal) or the 4S?

All of them. When you put them next to the wide variety of sizes and designs of Android phones, iPhones look pretty similar to each other. It's still one company with a short catalog vs 5 companies with huge catalogs and better deals with networks to push their phones into the hands of people (2x1, free on contract,...). I think its pretty impressive.

Better deals with networks? iPhones are heavily subsidized at the cost of Android devices by the carriers.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/12/15/verizon_soakin...

Well yes in reality there's 5 companies, just like there's about 7 or 8 iPhones, but when you put them all together next to the wide variety of companies that exist they all look kind of similar so I prefer to think of them as just one company. And that one company is outselling Apple in smartphones! It's amazing really.

Do you really – honestly — believe that there are millions of iPhone faithful?

There are people who buy smartphones and people who, when given the choice, will pick an iPhone. There are not millions of iPhone faithful. Those have to be a tiny minority.

http://www.bgr.com/2011/09/22/ubs-iphones-89-retention-rate-...

> There are not millions of iPhone faithful. Those have to be a tiny minority.

Your statements don't make sense. There can easily be millions of iPhone faithful and those millions can also be a tiny minority. How many iPhone users are there in the world? I don't know, but could it be on the order of 100 million? I think so (especially with the knowledge that there are a few hundred thousand purchases every day, it stands to reason that there could be close to 100 million iPhone users worldwide - please correct me if you have better figures).

With those estimates, a 1% tiny minority represents a 1-million-strong iPhone faithful group.

The scales involved make that problematic. Apple fanbois don’t make or break Apple’s holiday business, they are inconsequential to their smartphone business given its scale.

I don't think anyone is really ready to call the race. And despite being an Android booster, I am very pleased to see Apple continuing to do gangbusters.

The worst thing that could happen would be a marginalized Apple.

We need competition in this market. Android made iOS better, and iOS makes Android better. It is fantastic that we are past the point when iOS can't essentially coast on the fact that it has the network effect and the app base -- Android is now a compelling choice for Johnny Regularperson, with all of the big apps you want and all of the big services.

It's not actually December sales, it's the 3-month period leading up to December (in the US).

This of course includes Oct 14th, the US release date of iPhone 4S, (also the first release on Sprint) and the date on which the other two models were refreshed/repriced.

Still a whole lot of phones getting sold, but you might otherwise look at the graph and think the sales were escalating swiftly in the two months after (re-)launch, which I doubt is the case. More likely a spike for launch followed by a dip followed by another spike for Christmas.

Also, The first figure given for Android is also an unusual spike up from their previous figure of low fifties probably caused more by people not buying iPhones in the three months before the iPhone 4S came out, rather than even larger than normal numbers of people buying Android phones in that period. It would be interesting to see what the difference would be if they didn't normalise it to 100%.

Expect the marketshare split to stay fluid like this until one of the platforms is successful at locking in institutions - schools, businesses, creative professionals, government, etc.

I'd wager that the reason for the surge is primarily the free 3GS instead of the 4S. It's the entry into the low cost market that was previously dominated by cheap android devices.

I highly doubt it. The 3GS is available only on AT&T, whereas the 4 and 4S are available on several US carriers.

Oh, didn't know that, I'm in Europe. Ok, good to know.

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