[hashedout]

The units that Apple moves in India is still significant but the population being so large, the "market share" is very low due to pricey hardware. Apple is not a lesser known brand in India, in Metro and even small cities, people do use Apple products but the middle class and lower economy people can't afford such an expensive phone. This is the reason why Xiaomi, Moto, Lenovo have taken over big names such as Samsung in terms of market share. Most people who buy iPhones in India do not care about the ecosystem that Apple offers, it's just a status symbol to them. In fact most of the population doesn't care about the ecosystem that a device offers, they just want a bang for their buck.

[JumpCrisscross]

> the "market share" is very low

The one chart in this article measures market share by units sold. So five $20 phones would have more "market share" than one $300 phone, which seems silly from a commercial perspective.

[wlesieutre]

Unit market share is useful for some things, revenue market share is useful for others. If you wanted to talk about how solid iMessage is as a platform, maybe for the relative value of selling sticker packs and other iMessage tie-ins designed for the Indian market versus doing something cross platform or on Android, you might be interested in knowing how many users there are in each camp.

On the other hand, the people buying $20 phones might be less likely to spend $1 on your app than the people buying $300 phones, so unit market share doesn't tell the whole story either.

Any attempt to boil the whole thing down to one number is going to have shortcomings, but it's still useful to look at the numbers as long as you keep them in mind.

[m23khan]

excellent comment!