Mobile Hardware Statistics (and more) | Hacker News Reader

Mobile Hardware Statistics (and more)

blogs.unity3d.com

53 pointstwidlit30 comments

Relevant: http://david-smith.org/iosversionstats

    All platforms (on iOS 6): 87%
    iPhone: 93%
    iPad: 78%
    iPod touch: 80%

I'm a bit surprised as to why % of iPads running iOS 6 is so low. I mean, IIRC ~150M iPads were sold, and only 12M of them were iPad 1. But I guess his app (Audiobooks) is not a good representative of what people do with their iPads, so I take his numbers (about the iPad) with a grain of salt.

My guess would be that iPhones get used a lot more frequently.

iPhones are also used in a much more personal context, whereas corporations, hospitals, schools, and shops use iPads for more general purposes.

Aren't there a lot of institutional iPad users (schools, etc)?

I think its because the first gen iPads are still very useful but they don't support iOS6. Where as my 3GS iPhone does.

According to the article:

"Interesting that first iPad can be pretty much ignored now (1.5%), whereas iPad 2 is still more popular than any of the later iPad models."

I work on a pretty darned popular iOS app - these numbers are representative of what we've seen here also. iOS6 uptake on iPad lags substantially behind iPhone.

I can speculate on the reasoning but it's still a mystery. The sales of iPad 1's (which aren't compatible with iOS6) definitely contribute to the low numbers, but they do not explain the whole story.

I've purposely kept my iPad on 5.x because iOS 5 maps is the only iPad maps application that works well with public transit routing. iOS 6 maps doesn't do public transit at all, Google Maps and all the good third party transit routing apps are iPhone only.

Also a bunch of the new iOS 6 features (like Passbook, photo panorama, certain geofences, and the updated phone app) are not available at all on iPads. Siri (maybe?) and IPv6 over LTE are the only iOS 6 features I feel I am missing on the iPad so I am in no huge hurry to upgrade.

Windows XP is growing? That is terrifying for windows. I'm sure it is just China, but how fun would it be making mobile apps when everyone is switching back to a version from over 10 years ago?

China - and South Korea actually (and other countries in SE Asia) - are primarily on pirated versions of Windows. If computer adoption is up, it's up on the versions that are readily accessible to people.

It's been a while (so someone could tell me if South Korea is transitioning to Windows 7), but another thing you have to consider is you're not dealing with a "genuine" copy of Windows, so that creates some massive headaches for developers of typical computer games as well. It's par for the course for a developer in the US to pay someone like Nexon to handle porting to the Asian market not only to cover culturization and localization issues, but also to point out what won't run on non-genuine versions of Windows (and to help port the regionalized and original copies to no longer need those dependencies). This is a big deal, especially when you're sometimes at the mercy of PC bangs which, yes, largely run pirated copies (> 80% last time I remembered).

If they're not paying for windows, are they going to pay for your game? Why would you care if it runs on their systems or not? Or are game developers just wanting large numbers of freebie players to keep a network effect going, to keep some paying customers but also to keep competitors out (who'd also have to be catering to non-genuine windows users too?)

There are multiple factors here.

This data comes from users who _play_ Unity games. Whether they pay for them isn't known, but they definitely play games. That alone can be a desirable thing as you noted (network effects etc.).

It also might be that due to various reasons people there tend to not "buy" software (like OS), but are fine with subscriptions (MMOs are _huge_ in Korea) or IAPs.

In the case of China and Korea, most PC gamers aren't playing at home. The monetization model for computer games in east Asia is the polar opposite of the US and Western Europe. you definitely might care about this market because it's very large (note: negligible console penetration in these markets -- it's mostly mobile, PC or nothing)

They're playing at PC bangs (think lounge/club, where you can hang with friends, eat, smoke, sometimes drink, while playing games... you can even get rooms for the night at larger ones), which usually meter out access via an access card. The PC bang gives the publisher a cut of that revenue based on what the customer played. This is the case not only for MMOs, but also for the usual "box" model where you get the game outright. Instead, you just play the game at a PC bang, and the publisher gets a payment from the bang based on the time spent. In the case of F2P titles, publishers primarily get your money via the micro transaction system.

Even then, publishers don't deal with individual bangs/lounges/arcades, but aggregators. The aggregator provides the management/billing software to the bangs, and the publishers deal with those aggregators to get their revenue. The aggregators have no incentive however to ensure that the version of Windows installed at a bang is legit, but only to ensure that their management/billing software can run to provide that value to the bang operator, and to ensure the bang operator can make money in accordance with publisher agreements.

What software won't run on "non-geniune" Windows that is not from Microsoft itself?

This comes backwards. Probably more people with Windows XP used something from Unity from the first time.

Here is a link to the actual data: http://stats.unity3d.com/mobile/index-ios.html

And look at Windows XP! Almost half of the market at 47.7% http://stats.unity3d.com/web/index-win.html

Is it strange that I'm worried why the fuck they have these stats in the first place? I don't remember being asked whether I'd like my data submitted or not upon playing games powered by Unity. Do they also have my IMEI, phone contacts, emails and twitter accounts?

Do you have similar reaction when games do analytics (99% of them do)? Or when websites ping google analytics?

"do they also have my IMEI,contacts,..." - no we don't. We don't have your actual hardware stats either; all we have is "this quarter, this many Android 4.1s" and "that quarter, that many Tegra 3s".

The games can turn off hardware stats reporting if they wish to.

And people tell me I'm being paranoid for keeping my firewall on "block outbound", running as non-admin (windows), running the browser with noscript, adblock and no external cookies...

that's not paranoid; running the browser in a vm and doing a snapshot restore daily is.

As a Unity developer, I had no idea my games were phoning home to Unity HQ. This definitely seems like something that should be opt-in.

Also, maybe I'm being dense, but I can't find any information on how to turn it off or find it in the editor - could you share exactly what the option is called?

> "Do they also have my IMEI, phone contacts, emails and twitter accounts?"

No, that would be impossible without the app getting permission from you first.

> "why the fuck they have these stats in the first place?"

Because they need the stats to build the app. Knowing that a large percentage of their users are on Android 2.x prevents them from making breaking changes that won't work on older phones. Knowing the graphical and CPU performance of their demographics helps inform them of the limitations they need to place on their games to make them run properly on every device.

Or would you like to go back to the days where developers built completely blind to their target user base and simply published a set of System Requirements and leaves end users to decipher it and make sure they're compliant with it just to play your game?

This is no different than websites counting the number of page views and the browser market share of their visitors. This is purely aggregate work.

Maybe I haven't been following things close enough, why is there no significant presence for Android 3.x?

Android 3 was a tablet hack that was only on a limited number of devices...

Android 3.x was "the tablet OS" which was not very suitable for phones. The problem was, Android tablets back then (Motorola Xoom et al) did not exactly set the world on fire.

Almost all the phones skipped 3.x completely and moved from 2.3 to 4.x.

The real Android usage dashboard (which tracks closely to Unity's) is:

http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html

Actually, I thought it was interesting how different they were, at least in some respects. If you look at the ratio of pre 4.0 versions vs post 4.0 versions, in the Unity stats it's about 27% vs 72%, but on the Android dashboard it's 45% vs 54%.

Perhaps Unity apps aren't as widely used on older devices and thus the stats are skewed in favour of more recent versions of Android.

Then again, the Android dashboard data is collected from the Google Play Store, so it isn't a perfect representation of all Android users either.

Yeah could be just different demographics (and as usual, with any data set you have to keep in mind that it's not "perfect").

E.g. Unity apps are mostly games, so this probably represents "android users who play games". Whereas google's is "anyone who went to the store" (which I guess is a much wider population - as soon as anyone wants a Facebook app they have to go to the store, right?).

Android 3.x (Honey Comb) was just for tablets. At that time Android tablets weren’t very common, they become more popular after Android 4.0 was released.

Most devices that launched with Android 3.x have been upgraded to Android 4.0.

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