[gte910h]

This feels a bit cheerleadery?

This is actual PHONE MARKETSHARE being delivered (not necessarily sold, as many of them are subsidized to $0).

Additionally, looking at just phones is a myopic view of the mobile landscape, when tablets and mini tablets (aka, iPodTouches and sub 6" android tablets) are a huge source of gaming revenue.

[bunderbunder]

On the gaming revenue side, it's interesting that iOS accounts for about 85% of money spent on mobile games, and their share of the whole app revenue pie is similarly sized.

This suggests a very different picture than what we get from the raw handset shipment numbers. For the sake of argument, let's redefine how we subdivide the the mobile phone market market in terms of how people use their devices rather than what their devices are capable of. Considered that way, perhaps the app revenues suggest that Apple still completely dominates the smartphone market, and Android's handset shipment numbers simply reflect that the dumbphone market has been flooded with a smartphone OS because nowadays even the free phones are running Android.

[danmaz74]

All the basic apps that define a smartphone are free on Android (and on iOS, AFAIK), so your definition only makes sense if you redefine a smartphone as a tool that successfully forces you to spend money on software...

[bunderbunder]

Yup. In fact, that's exactly how I was proposing we might redefine it.

It's a worthwhile way to look at it because simply having apps to do certain things isn't really what defines a smartphone - feature phones were letting users buy and install BREW or J2ME apps for a long time. This includes all the basic apps that people tend to expect on their phones nowadays, like Facebook.

So, apps being nothing new, the line's always been a bit blurry. Using what OS the phone runs as a distinguishing criterion works fine, of course, and it's probably the most sensible one overall. But distinguishing based on the way people interact with the device, regardless of what OS it runs is also illuminative.

In this case, for example, it would seem to explain why the market for 3rd-party software (the thing that's supposed to be the heart and soul of smartphones) is so tiny on Android despite it being far and away the biggest smartphone platform. Perhaps it's the case that, regardless of what they're capable of, a huge percentage of the Android devices out there are still being used as if they were feature phones.

[MikeKusold]

I'd be interested in a link to that stat. I remember reading something similar a year ago and I'm curious if the landscape has since changed.

[drivebyacct2]

>(not necessarily sold, as many of them are subsidized to $0).

Why does that matter? [Samsung, Moto, etc] get that money. The subsidy doesn't just make the phone magically free. Besides, either way, it's NOT an iOS sale, or an WP7 sale, and that matters just as much.

[gte910h]

It implies a consumer preference that isn't necessarily there and appears to show android at a higher share of device use than is likely a real picture of actual user behavior.

Information that is wrong makes people make poor decisions. I would feel bad if someone overvalued this marketshare number when choosing to make apps, for instance.

Additionally the actual statistic gathered is "shipments" not "sales" which is a different definition. One KEY point there is TONS of iPhone 5's didn't ship in Q3, even though they were purchased then.

Lastly, quoting "shipments of smartphones" then talking about the iPad mini as if it's in these numbers makes the article itself dubious (it is not taken into account in these numbers).

I just want people to stop cheerleading and report facts. Android is leading in # of screens, I just want someone to quote accurate, non-bullshitty numbers about it, instead of fake sliced up numbers about it that give a false picture of the landscape because it ignores members of the ecosystem (Ignoring small tablets such as the galaxy S 5"/iPod Touches is like ignoring PCs that just don't happen to have a 802.11b card installed in them: A weird way to slice statistical data).