[jherdman]

> My POV is ... Apple leads the Mobile OS market share ... by a huge margin.

I'm having a really hard time understanding this statement. Does the author mean with respect to how updates are handled? It clearly cannot mean in terms of sheer number of installs, Android is clearly _leagues_ ahead of iOS in that regard.

[Gudin]

The conclusion is unexpected and stupid.

Android doesn't brag it has 75% share. Actual data is that 85% of smartphones run Android and that's market share. Fact that they are not updated to the latest version doesn't change the market share.

[matwood]

"Addressable" market share maybe? A developer can target iOS current version and current version-1, and cover the large majority of iOS devices. How far back does an Android developer have to target? Maybe it doesn't matter since the Android marketshare is so much larger that targeting current - 1 stills gets more devices than iOS.

[chipperyman573]

>Maybe it doesn't matter since the Android marketshare is so much larger that targeting current - 1 stills gets more devices than iOS.

That's an interesting way of thinking about it, getting 20% of 100 is more than getting 80% of 10. I think the problem you'd run into is that some users with androids would be upset they can't install your app when their friend that has an android can install it just fine.

[II2II]

One set of figures that I saw suggested that iOS 12.1 had a small lead over Android 8.1 in March 2019. (These were the most common versions at the time.) Consider all of the versions of iOS 12 and Android Oreo, then Android had a major lead. That is before considering Nought and Pie, which I suspect is the range of releases that most developers would target.

[ehsankia]

And if you want to compare "updating to the latest version", we should be comparing Pixel phones to iPhones. I'm sure Pixel's have a very similar rate of conversion, if not better.

[josteink]

He’s basically claiming that latest iOS has higher market share than latest Android version (which may be true), and from that concludes that the rest of the android versions in the market somehow don’t count, so iOS is biggest.

Android has its issues, but “math” like this isn’t the answer. This is drivel, really.

Also: See Wintel for fragmentation. Everywhere in nature and tech diversity is good. But somehow not for mobile phone OSes.

[arendtio]

> diversity is good

It depends on what the cause is. If I have no option to update to a recent version and causing diversity that way, it is bad. If I can choose to install a custom version, it is good. So in Android's case, the diversity is just a symptom of the underlying fragmentation of responsibility for updates.

However, phone manufacturers might see this a bit differently.

[sidlls]

What are the numbers in terms of revenue? Share of installations doesn't mean quite as much if that ratio is in Apple's favor.

[IloveHN84]

Wait, what? We are comparing really the 90% of Android Global Market Share vs 9% of iOS?