Google Android continues growth streak over Apple's iPhone < - Page 2

Android may be gaining, but it is not a fair comparison when you have dozens of manufacturers
producing dozens and dozens of models, whereas Apple has 1, if you don't account for color,
memory or carrier. I've had a "rooted" Nook Color, allowing me to use the Android Marketplace,
and their selection sucks compared to Apple's App Store. Love Android all you want. It still sucks.

I think the comparison between OEMs is a lot more reasonable, especially when we remember that Apple started from nowhere only a few years ago - I mean - my mother still uses a phone that is older than Apple's presence in this market.

At current rates Apple will overtake Moto within a year in the US. That's huge.

Here in Spain, or in UK or Italy you can get iPhones 4 for free depending on the contract. Are those also "sales"?

What? How do you compare moneymaking in a business when one company's profits are calculated based on GR minus COGS (read primarily hardware) and the other makes no hardware? You can compare MS and GOOG, but not AAPL with either? To force a comparison would be naive and plain wrong. So pls stop doing that because you're smart enough to know better, aren't you?

Yes. Apple still gets money. The carriers pay them.

Ah, carriers don't pay HTC or Motorola?

Huh? You can get an iPhone-4 free on contract in some places, it's completely sustainable - the contract is effectively a lease on the hardware with free minutes thrown in.

The real proof for android phones low margins is the cheap pay-as-you-go offers. From Orange in the UK you can pick up an Android handset for £80 with no contract, the cheapest unlocked iPhones are about £400.

They do, but less - we can estimate it by looking at PAYG prices (from orange UK)

HTC WIldfire S - £170.
S-E Xperia X8 -£120
S-E Xperia X10 - £160
HTC Cha-Cha - £190

3GS - £400
iPhone-4 £600

Kinda different eh?

One interesting outlier

HTC 7 Mozart (WP7) £410

I have no idea what to make of that.

You don't understand what 'cost of capital' means do you?

Would you like me to explain?

Yes

Galaxy SII £499.90
HTC Desire S £429.90
HTC Sensation £459.90

And?

There are definitely some high margin HTC products and Samsung products, however that's not where the bulk of the Android market share is - and none of them have margin to compare to the £600 iPhone-4.

Android overall has been good for handset maker margins, but it hasn't pushed them anywhere near to Apple levels on average, and the profit numbers make that fairly clear.

Yes, but the original discussions was that given away phones can't count toward sales

Yeh - I'm with you on that, 'given away' on a £40/month 18month contract is still plenty profitable. HTC and Samsung seem to have sustainable businesses, but Moto & S-E are pretty questionable.

Puts everything in persepctive doesnt it?

What perspective would that be? That most of the global phone market is still the standard feature phone and not a smart phone?

To put things even further into perspective Nokia still sells more than any other handset maker world wide. Which shows you how far Android and iOS both still have to go.

It would be interesting to know who the biggest US smartphone maker is though, it's almost certainly Apple.

Now, that puts things into perspective.

I've thumped, dropped, tossed, and carried it in my pocket with assorted nasty sharp objects and it hasn't cracked scratched or failed. If that's "delicate", I can't wait until they toughen it up more! I frankly don't need any cracked iPhones and haven't ever had one in spite of my treatment of it. Besides a cracked back only costs 29 bucks to replace anyway - should that ever happen. Perhaps if you stopped moshing with it taped to your forehead, or driving over it?? *wink*

Agreed - I actually find it's a bit tougher than my original iphone

The highlighted section is a statement I wonder about all the time. Aple needs competitors to keep innovating? Really? So when they jumped into the smartphone market segment all the other OEM were poised to leap ahead in design and function but Apple beat them to it? Not when you compare the Nokia N series, the Android pre-iPhone prototype, the BB Bolds/Curves/Tours, HTC's P, T or S series (pre Android), all of these and the rest were incrementalists not innovators. Apple stepped out in front of pretty much everyone, established the capacitive touch benchmark. Apple spent some time tightening up its own platform and when the time is right - they will do it again.

And again, the whole "tablet" thing. Netbooks. Who else is delivering innovation at the same rate Apple is - and I do mean deliver - not just "talk". So if Apple is characteristically out-innovating everyone else without there being significant competition - what good is there in saying that "competition is great"? Or is this yet another commerical truism that is used to justify mere incrementalism and "running in the pack"?

The thing is, what is Nokia's platform breakdown? Most of Nokia's handsets are feature phones, Android and iOS are not feature phone OSs. Care needs to be taken when you make comparisons, otherwise you're liable to compare offerings in very different categories. Stated another way, I don't see why they'd dump Symbian if it was really pulling in the numbers that it should.

These reports are always interesting, but the real numbers are profits. As long as Apple keeps making money, our platform will continue to improve. And as long as the platform makes money for developers, things will just get better and better.

Yeah, yeah, it's an ego boost to be the biggest, but the real number that matters is money.

The numbers for Microsoft aren't as dire as suggested here since they've got multiple platforms. True, their older platforms are probably losing share faster than new one is gaining ground... but still... it's not quite as dire of a situation is these oversimplified numbers suggest.

Also: I'm always amused when people compare ONE PHONE against countless phones phones phones by countless companies. I dare anyone here to even try to list all of the Android phones. Good luck with that!

And the amusement is on...

How must be compared OS marketshare?

Oh absolutely, and even Symbian phones that are categorized as smartphones are really just feature-phone++. But as you also pointed out a lot of Samsung's sales are also feature-phone. Heck a lot of the smartphones are Bada, which is only a smartphone if you squint and tilt your head to one side.

AGREED

Apple has 3 models of iphone out there
Androids has scores of models coming on and off the selling floor each .

so 160 odd android models phone
against
.....3 Iphone models


160
vs
3

Apple far out sell's all comers by far .

Weird data day.



9

Please re-read. You completely missed my point.

But just to play along, as per your response... having only an 11.5% greater reach using multiple devices on a single OS than a single device on a single OS says quite a bit about Android (no doubt), but it says more (IMO) about Apple (speculative "hype" set aside). My point (back on track) is that none of this matters. People will argue over it until they're blue in the face. Everyone has a different figure to show or short run statistic to quote.

I don't think that your analysis is correct nor your recollection of history. The Android is Windows analogy has been raised and dashed many times over the past 2 years. Phones are nothing like PC's and phones are only one segment of the overall Post-PC market (which Apple continues to dominate). Apple has never been the market leader in smartphones at any point in its life, but remains the market leader in its chosen segment - high-end smartphones. It massively outsells all high-end Androids/WP7/WebOS put together. The way Apple dominates the financials of the entire phone industry (as it now does in PCs) is totally unlike any former situation with Mac in the 80s/90s where Apple was always way behind the IBM PC/compatibles and then specifically behind MS/Windows. Apple never dominated in units or financially throughout the early/mid Mac days, no matter how much Apple fans want to recall that they did. Today, Apple makes 4% of all PCs and takes over 33% of all the entire PC industry profits. Lenovo would be better off sticking its cash in a CD than make computers (1.5% net margins) and that goes for most PC makers.

If Apple can own 25-33% of the (smart)phone market going forward (ie slow steady growth as it is doing), it will be making phenomenal (see WalMart size) revenue and Exxon/Mobil sized profits given the growth of the underlying market. If it creates a serious $250 unlocked phone, it could take 40%+. Either way, Android mopping up the "Anything But Apple" votes, the "want an iPhone but it's not on my carrier", "the guy in the shop said this was the best one" or the "I'm a nerd and I love rooting" crowd may take 50-60% of the market units but it will always be a far less valuable platform to Google, OEMs and developers. It does not really limit Apple nor its ecosystem. Also, given that iOS owners seem to spend some major multiple (from 5X-18X) on content and apps vs. Android users, it would take a lot more than a doubling of share vs. iOS to make the Android world remotely as valuable as iOS to all the constituencies that count.

Your assumption that to be the dominant player, you need to rule the unit share charts is vastly oversimplistic. You just need to dominate the right end of the sales charts. That, Apple is doing very well and the absolute economics of phones does not mean that even an iPhone is out of the easy reach of most middle income people in the world. It is not losing share, it is doubling sales every year, still with a predominantly premium phone line up.

Did Apple see the "Windows" of the phone world coming from Google - maybe, maybe not - probably expected RIM/MS/Nokia to be the ones to make massive OEM arrangements to combat the iPhone, but not knowing it was Google does not mean they weren't entirely ready for the competition. I think it is clear that this time, Apple learned from its mistakes to create the ultimate ecosystem, maintain brand loyalty in a community 4X the size of the Mac user-base, create and dominate 2 other categories (Touch PMPs/Tablets) and has so far avoided making any particularly egregious new ones.

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Ok - first, that's not only smartphones, that's the entire handset segment.
second that's not sales, that's share of subscribers.

Next time try reading the little words that come alongside the pretty numbers

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No, that was my point - the numbers I'm interested in haven't been released. I'd settle for which OEM has the largest consumer share of smartphones, but even for that I'd need to know what percent of Samsung/Moto/LGs handsets were smartphones

We do know that Apple, RIM and Palm only make smartphones, so we know their share of consumers are the same as platform share.

ie.

Apple - 26.6%
RIM - 24.7%
Palm - 2.4%

So there's 46.3% left to be divided up between Samsung/LG/Moto/HTC - we'll assume Symbian is at 0%.

If we ignore HTC & SE and assume that the other 3 have a roughly equal proportion of smartphones it would be

Samsung - 18.82%
Moto -11.5%
LG - 16%

In which case Apple is now the number one maker of smartphones in the US market. But that's based on a lot of supposition, and if it's the case why hasn't it been shouted out at any point by Apple PR?

It gets even more pronounced if we try to look at current sales instead of share existing handsets. There we know that Apple is up at more like 31% (from the Nielsen numbers).

The phone is durable, but an accidental drop of 4ft to a parquet on OSB floor was all it took to break my iPhone 4 screen. I think it was largely very bad luck on the angle of impact. Otherwise, the screen has survived worse.

" they're generally pretty... thrifty."

Or cheap.

anecdotal evidence is irrelevant. look at the data because its been determined to be the most delicate and the most often broken phone.

of course competition compels innovation. the dominant players before apple were fairly established in their product lineup. if apple hadn't differentiated itself to the amazing level that they did, then it would be a very different story for apple today. they blew everyone out of the water because of their innovation.

Umm.. I don't get it.. Smartphone 55% of recent phone acquirer market (same as 3 months previous), Android is 27% of this (same as 3 months previous), iPhone(iOS) increases 7% to 17% in same 3 months. How is it that iPhones are now driving the market? Seems the 27% that Android represents still 'drives' the smartphone section of the market.

Well, it depends on the topic of the survey.. I believe the survey in this thread is about Android OS and iPhone OS (I doubt they deliberately used only selected iPhone 4 numbers and excluded iPhone 3GS and it's still working predecessors). As the survey is about their relative growth, in this instance it is 'fair'. Comparing Apple's 'one model for all' approach to Android's 'choose the model that suits YOU' approach is like comparing Ford Motor's initial Model-T vs the selection that other car makers developed. They each work for their respective customers.

I agree you do pay for the infrastructure and service you get from Apple by buying their products, but I don't think I like how they come across as arrogant in the extreme in their responses to problems that crop up in their products. Bugs in iTunes, iPhone4 antennae and recent trojan to mention a few. I realize part of their marketing is their mystique of being safe from such problems, but saying 'don't do that' (to put it mildly) is just plain unhelpful.

If you are looking for comparisons of model to model, iPhone to a single Android phone, you have to look no further than a search using your selected iPhone model and the Android phone model as search terms in any search engine.

Ah, but the numbers never really did point to the 'better' platform, just the more popular one. For one reason or another there are more Android subscribers each quarter than iPhone. It may be price, it may be features, heck it may even be because someone they know has one.

Free with contract is good.. Mobile phone providers are concerned more with the long term contracts than the sale of the single device.. From the Provider's point of view I would bet the income gained from the larger number of Android long-term subscribers trump the income they get from the iPhone subscribers. And that's before any subscriber profit-sharing to Apple is taken out (assuming that practice still exists like it does today in Japan).

How do your friends make phone calls if they keep turning off their 3G service? If those free apps are doing what they want them to do, why argue about it? It sounds like you're disappointed someone isn't making money off your friends.

The Android 'giveaway' as you put it is easily sustainable.. The cost of the phone is recovered via the long-term subscription plan, Google gets no profit from the phone sales and very little from the app sales since a majority of the slice that comes out of the app dev's sales goes to the mobile phone providers. Google gets its profits from the users using their services (Google Voice, Google Maps, Google Search, etc.). Manufacturers don't give their phones away, they sell them to the providers. No one is losing money. It is just a different business model than Apple.