[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.