Why do you bet that? What do you think an activation is?
An Activation is every time a device is "reset". When a phone is reset it generates two unique keys (reset 4 times you get 8 unique keys). One is associated with your Google services/accounts and the other is for geo-services. When the account key is logged in for the first time, it "Activates" the phone with Google specific services for GMail and such.
In his case, this engineer went between multiple Android handsets (he had 3) and when he went from phone to phone to phone (this could happen many times/week), he would move the SIM card from phone to phone and reset. Each reset was counted as an "Activation".
While his case is special (developing) it does show there is a weak correlation to "Activations" and sales. His 3 phones might post a dozen "Activations"/week. The overwhelming majority of cases, however, have a 1 to 1 relationship between a user and a phone. None the less, resetting a phone seems fairly common in the "rooting" and "hacking" world of Android so this might be an artificial weighting.
Without transparency from Google, we have no idea what this "Activation" number really represents. It might represent sales or a number 1.3X larger than actual sales.
Likewise, this engineer did NOT work on the Android team but had good friends that did. It is possible that the Google "Activation" count counts a unique handsets UDID a single time.
An Activation is every time a device is "reset". When a phone is reset it generates two unique keys (reset 4 times you get 8 unique keys). One is associated with your Google services/accounts and the other is for geo-services. When the account key is logged in for the first time, it "Activates" the phone with Google specific services for GMail and such.
In his case, this engineer went between multiple Android handsets (he had 3) and when he went from phone to phone to phone (this could happen many times/week), he would move the SIM card from phone to phone and reset. Each reset was counted as an "Activation".
While his case is special (developing) it does show there is a weak correlation to "Activations" and sales. His 3 phones might post a dozen "Activations"/week. The overwhelming majority of cases, however, have a 1 to 1 relationship between a user and a phone. None the less, resetting a phone seems fairly common in the "rooting" and "hacking" world of Android so this might be an artificial weighting.
Without transparency from Google, we have no idea what this "Activation" number really represents. It might represent sales or a number 1.3X larger than actual sales.
Likewise, this engineer did NOT work on the Android team but had good friends that did. It is possible that the Google "Activation" count counts a unique handsets UDID a single time.
There were many Google Engineers at WWDC learning about Lion and iOS 5. You spend lots of your life at WWDC standing in lines. Lines for lunch. Lines for breakfast. Lines to get in in the morning. Lines to attend sessions. Lines to attend labs. And don't get me started on the line for the Keynote.
Lines. Lines. Lines. Everywhere Lines.
While in lines, you strike up conversations and in this case, I asked on of the Google Engineers that was standing next to me wat "Activations" meant.
You know that will never happen. In general, fandroids have extreme anti-Apple sentiments.
If you follow that line of argument, then Apple fanboys are equally biased. But why not allow room for those of us who are simply engineers and will either praise or criticize a product for its pros and cons? Judge a comment on its merits and do not refute it using irrelevant characterizations. It is possible that someone disagrees with a comment because the comment is simply wrong (often the case here), not because of their pro-Android sentiments.
While your conclusion may be correct, your evidence isn't. The problem with that survey is it only gives the proportion of service calls that are hardware related - that could be caused by Android having worse hardware, or it could be caused by Android having fewer problems with carriers, software, ...
The report explicitly says that it doesn't cover actual issue rates (so called Propensity To Call) because they don't have enough information about the population of users to make a determination. So we can't use that survey to estimate the chance that an Android handset will develop a hardware fault versus an iOS handset or a BB handset.
Unfortunately that report is pretty much useless.
Precisely!
There are obviously crappy Android phones, because there are so many Android licensees. But I don't understand those who generalize it to all Android phones. This is actually a disservice to Apple, as if iOS and iPXXX devices cannot stand on its merits and can only shine in comparison to fabricated Android problems.
He Perhaps doesn't but a friend of someone tell me something not baked by any evidence it's not the best source
It depends on who it is. In this case, it was a Google Engineer that worked at the Plex. While he worked in the Google Earth team, he did lots of mobile development and has good friends that work on the Android team. Not only that, it makes sense because we have been told by Google devices without the Google Services are not counted in the Activation numbers.
The source is 10X better than Engadget, SlashGear or AI. The description is reasonable but, as I said, because Google refuses to be transparent on the matter, we simply don't know. There may be multiple "Activation" numbers within Google for different things.
That's true for people who go to the mobile shops and aren't sure what they actually want or need. iPhone's are sold by word of mouth, not sales pitches or shelf display zazz. Most of the people I know who have recently switched to the iPhone, have done so because they saw someone (a friend) using one.
I believe the iPhone's share will rise significantly after iOS 5 is released this fall as it will offer all the significant benefits of both Androind and BlackBerry and even improve upon them.
All of my friends who have Android phones *wanted* an iPhone but couldn't get one because it was either unavailable to them, too expensive, etc. So they *settled* for an Android phone that was "pretty much like an iPhone".
So Apple's failure to grab as much as one-third of the smartphone market in 4 years should also be deemed a failure in some ways? I think not, and I'm fairly certain you wouldn't apply the same standard.
In the fall of 2009 Apple held 14% of the smartphone market, up from 2% a year prior. That was considered "eating everyone's lunch" by some analysts. In the fall of 2009 Android had 2% share, and now surges to 38% in less than two year's. Is that still the equivalent of "eating everyone's lunch"?
So Solipcism, there's still the unanswered question: Which OS should the OEM's be adopting?
You missed Solipsism's point. Android OS is FREE and distributed a vast amount of OEMs that now have an incentive to develop Android phones as it both saves R&D and allows them to compete against iOS without having to spend the time developing their own OS.
iOS, on the other hand, is not free, and is proprietary to Apple. So you have ONE vendor using a proprietary OS vs. a myriad of vendors using a FREE OS. And iOS combined still controls around half of the market.
Windows wasn't free, and yet that controlled the market totally. Android IS free, and yet is in second place (save for phones).
"Except for a few errors, they all appear only once in the list."
It does seem tied to account activations with a phone.
"Crystal clear, right? No, not really. An often heard question is the following one: ?Does everytime I flash a ROM count as an activation??. No, and I?ve got proof.
No he does not. We don't know if this list is what Google uses for the word "Activations". In the explanation I was given, the pattern might be: An "Activation" is when a phone is activated to Google services (after a reset/upgrade/ROM Flash) and the newly activated phone is different than the previously activate phone.
That might explain his "errors". So a simply reset or upgrade won't count unless you also change phones. That would explain why the engineer told me his phones were counted as activated multiple times/day at times. We was doing a reset with a change of phones?
Do you mean distros? Linux distress is what I feel when I see how they bloated KDE & Gnome in an attempt to compete
Linux didn't fail on the desktop because it's flawed for the desktop. Way back in 1995 Linux offered a demonstrably superior desktop experience to Windows 3.1, what it lacked was applications. Linux failed on the desktop for market reasons, not for technical reasons.
But for the most part, market reasons are the important thing. Marketing 101 tells you that simply building a better mousetrap doesn't mean you'll be successful.
What good is a computer without applications? All of us Apple users in the 90s experienced the frustration of having only a small subset of applications available for a long time. Windows wasn't successful because it was a better OS.
It's the same with mobile OS. Without applications, the platform will always be relegated to a niche. Which is why the iOS and Android have been so successful on smartphones, at the expense of Blackberry and webOS.
On tablets, the game is even more shifted toward iOS, as what other platform has 100,000 tablet apps? Other tablet sales might spike for a bit while they are "new", but unless a platform has a healthy library of applications, it doesn't have the fuel necessary for growth ? it's like a fire that quickly burns hot, but then dies when there's no wood. Unless QNX, webOS, and even Android for tablets builds up a competitive library of applications, they'll be relegated to a niche, like Apple was in the 90s.
But for the most part, market reasons are the important thing. Marketing 101 tells you that simply building a better mousetrap doesn't mean you'll be successful.
Exactly my point, so even a 'completely free' OS like Android, had barriers to entry, which it has spectacularly overcome. Handset makers needed to be convinced, carriers needed to be convinced, users, developers, content owners, etc. There are limits to how quickly that can happen, even for Android. Now it's certainly true that the limits to Android's rate of growth were less than the limits to iOS, but limits existed and still exist nevertheless.
Windows wasn't free, and yet that controlled the market totally. Android IS free, and yet is in second place (save for phones).
And MS did so within 20 months? And I'm not sure what free has to do with it. Like I asked Solipcism earlier in the thread, what's the OEM's better options for an OS?
That might explain his "errors". So a simply reset or upgrade won't count unless you also change phones. That would explain why the engineer told me his phones were counted as activated multiple times/day at times. We was doing a reset with a change of phones?
No idea, like I said I'm not sure how much light it sheds, we're trying to stitch a tapestry out of scraps here. Nothing that this guy says directly contradicts what your guy said though. Switching a sim between phones is a very different thing to just re-flashing a phone. Google may use some kind of combination of SIM id, GSM id, MAC address etc which eliminates some duplications but not all.
Interesting point though, Google could clear all this up, and Google knows that clearing it up would increase the value of the metric to analysts etc, so they must have a reason for not doing that. One possible reason is that the real number is much lower once duplicates are stripped out, another reason is that they're already stripping duplicates really well, but the way that they do it would have privacy implications that might cause bad PR.
Maybe there are other possible reasons, but I can't help thinking that they must have a reason - because as a big seller of advertising, Google knows the value of auditable numbers.
It's a legitimate concern to know what counts as an activation. If you buy an Android phone and it's returned a week later because it's faulty for a replacement Android phone is that 2 activations? If you return it for an iPhone does that still count as 1 activation? Does flashing the ROM to then root the device count as an activation? Does each new gmail account added to the device (e.g., selling it) count as an activation?
I?d like those details too.
I have, I believe, 2 iPhone activations: a 3G and then a 4. I?m keeping my 3G as an iPod for multiplayer and other casual uses.
My two Android-using friends probably have six or eight between them, and counting! Because every single Android phone they try disappoints them, and they always get another one quickly. I shudder to think of the unsubsidized cost of that habit! But somewhere is a drawerful of their Android phones that couldn?t receive voice calls for unknown software reasons, or couldn?t last the day on a battery charge. Do these two people get counted as new activations every time? Or were their initial two activations counted, and no more after that?
Interesting point though, Google could clear all this up, and Google knows that clearing it up would increase the value of the metric to analysts etc, so they must have a reason for not doing that. One possible reason is that the real number is much lower once duplicates are stripped out, another reason is that they're already stripping duplicates really well, but the way that they do it would have privacy implications that might cause bad PR.
I don't see Google's reason as being altruistic at all. Big numbers sound good especially in advertising. Since Google is interested in number of eyes on the screen, the number of activations give an indication of the number of "newish" accounts are looking at devices even if the device has been used by 3 people prior to that.
I kind of agree with your sentiment; visiting Sweden right now, and was walking around a mall with 5-6 kiosks selling phones. Now that everything looks like the iPhone, I can't imagine how a consumer would be able to differentiate between models. From a sales perspective, it would be easy to say "all these phones are Android, except for that lonely one over there which is an Apple." It is the same old problem with buying a Mac at BestBuy 5-6 years ago... sure they have them, but the sales guy would never encourage it.
But, the solution is pretty easy... it just comes down to using advertising for consumer education. I do like the idea of having a few different models available from Apple though.
You can buy any Apple stuff at an Apple Store. That's what I call PARADISE! We need no stinking Best buy!
Comments
Why do you bet that? What do you think an activation is?
An Activation is every time a device is "reset". When a phone is reset it generates two unique keys (reset 4 times you get 8 unique keys). One is associated with your Google services/accounts and the other is for geo-services. When the account key is logged in for the first time, it "Activates" the phone with Google specific services for GMail and such.
In his case, this engineer went between multiple Android handsets (he had 3) and when he went from phone to phone to phone (this could happen many times/week), he would move the SIM card from phone to phone and reset. Each reset was counted as an "Activation".
While his case is special (developing) it does show there is a weak correlation to "Activations" and sales. His 3 phones might post a dozen "Activations"/week. The overwhelming majority of cases, however, have a 1 to 1 relationship between a user and a phone. None the less, resetting a phone seems fairly common in the "rooting" and "hacking" world of Android so this might be an artificial weighting.
Without transparency from Google, we have no idea what this "Activation" number really represents. It might represent sales or a number 1.3X larger than actual sales.
Likewise, this engineer did NOT work on the Android team but had good friends that did. It is possible that the Google "Activation" count counts a unique handsets UDID a single time.
An Activation is every time a device is "reset". When a phone is reset it generates two unique keys (reset 4 times you get 8 unique keys). One is associated with your Google services/accounts and the other is for geo-services. When the account key is logged in for the first time, it "Activates" the phone with Google specific services for GMail and such.
In his case, this engineer went between multiple Android handsets (he had 3) and when he went from phone to phone to phone (this could happen many times/week), he would move the SIM card from phone to phone and reset. Each reset was counted as an "Activation".
While his case is special (developing) it does show there is a weak correlation to "Activations" and sales. His 3 phones might post a dozen "Activations"/week. The overwhelming majority of cases, however, have a 1 to 1 relationship between a user and a phone. None the less, resetting a phone seems fairly common in the "rooting" and "hacking" world of Android so this might be an artificial weighting.
Without transparency from Google, we have no idea what this "Activation" number really represents. It might represent sales or a number 1.3X larger than actual sales.
Likewise, this engineer did NOT work on the Android team but had good friends that did. It is possible that the Google "Activation" count counts a unique handsets UDID a single time.
Any sources?
Any sources?
Why would he need any?
Any sources?
Read the title.
There were many Google Engineers at WWDC learning about Lion and iOS 5. You spend lots of your life at WWDC standing in lines. Lines for lunch. Lines for breakfast. Lines to get in in the morning. Lines to attend sessions. Lines to attend labs. And don't get me started on the line for the Keynote.
Lines. Lines. Lines. Everywhere Lines.
While in lines, you strike up conversations and in this case, I asked on of the Google Engineers that was standing next to me wat "Activations" meant.
Why would he need any?
You know that will never happen. In general, fandroids have extreme anti-Apple sentiments.
If you follow that line of argument, then Apple fanboys are equally biased. But why not allow room for those of us who are simply engineers and will either praise or criticize a product for its pros and cons? Judge a comment on its merits and do not refute it using irrelevant characterizations. It is possible that someone disagrees with a comment because the comment is simply wrong (often the case here), not because of their pro-Android sentiments.
While your conclusion may be correct, your evidence isn't. The problem with that survey is it only gives the proportion of service calls that are hardware related - that could be caused by Android having worse hardware, or it could be caused by Android having fewer problems with carriers, software, ...
The report explicitly says that it doesn't cover actual issue rates (so called Propensity To Call) because they don't have enough information about the population of users to make a determination. So we can't use that survey to estimate the chance that an Android handset will develop a hardware fault versus an iOS handset or a BB handset.
Unfortunately that report is pretty much useless.
Precisely!
There are obviously crappy Android phones, because there are so many Android licensees. But I don't understand those who generalize it to all Android phones. This is actually a disservice to Apple, as if iOS and iPXXX devices cannot stand on its merits and can only shine in comparison to fabricated Android problems.
He Perhaps doesn't but a friend of someone tell me something not baked by any evidence it's not the best source
It depends on who it is. In this case, it was a Google Engineer that worked at the Plex. While he worked in the Google Earth team, he did lots of mobile development and has good friends that work on the Android team. Not only that, it makes sense because we have been told by Google devices without the Google Services are not counted in the Activation numbers.
The source is 10X better than Engadget, SlashGear or AI. The description is reasonable but, as I said, because Google refuses to be transparent on the matter, we simply don't know. There may be multiple "Activation" numbers within Google for different things.
http://www.androidstuffph.info/andro...ey-break-down/
Not sure how much light that sheds.
That's true for people who go to the mobile shops and aren't sure what they actually want or need. iPhone's are sold by word of mouth, not sales pitches or shelf display zazz. Most of the people I know who have recently switched to the iPhone, have done so because they saw someone (a friend) using one.
I believe the iPhone's share will rise significantly after iOS 5 is released this fall as it will offer all the significant benefits of both Androind and BlackBerry and even improve upon them.
All of my friends who have Android phones *wanted* an iPhone but couldn't get one because it was either unavailable to them, too expensive, etc. So they *settled* for an Android phone that was "pretty much like an iPhone".
They're the same people who buy Malt-O-Meal
I bet i'm talking to one now.
No, Gwydion is just difficult and a contrarian. I have a friend just like him/her.
Whatever you argue, they argue the opposite, often just for the sake of arguing the other side.
Come to think of it, I'm like that too.
So Apple's failure to grab as much as one-third of the smartphone market in 4 years should also be deemed a failure in some ways? I think not, and I'm fairly certain you wouldn't apply the same standard.
In the fall of 2009 Apple held 14% of the smartphone market, up from 2% a year prior. That was considered "eating everyone's lunch" by some analysts. In the fall of 2009 Android had 2% share, and now surges to 38% in less than two year's. Is that still the equivalent of "eating everyone's lunch"?
http://www.businessinsider.com/henry...-lunch-2009-10
So Solipcism, there's still the unanswered question: Which OS should the OEM's be adopting?
You missed Solipsism's point. Android OS is FREE and distributed a vast amount of OEMs that now have an incentive to develop Android phones as it both saves R&D and allows them to compete against iOS without having to spend the time developing their own OS.
iOS, on the other hand, is not free, and is proprietary to Apple. So you have ONE vendor using a proprietary OS vs. a myriad of vendors using a FREE OS. And iOS combined still controls around half of the market.
Windows wasn't free, and yet that controlled the market totally. Android IS free, and yet is in second place (save for phones).
A bit of googling throws up
http://www.androidstuffph.info/andro...ey-break-down/
Not sure how much light that sheds.
"Except for a few errors, they all appear only once in the list."
It does seem tied to account activations with a phone.
"Crystal clear, right? No, not really. An often heard question is the following one: ?Does everytime I flash a ROM count as an activation??. No, and I?ve got proof.
No he does not. We don't know if this list is what Google uses for the word "Activations". In the explanation I was given, the pattern might be: An "Activation" is when a phone is activated to Google services (after a reset/upgrade/ROM Flash) and the newly activated phone is different than the previously activate phone.
That might explain his "errors". So a simply reset or upgrade won't count unless you also change phones. That would explain why the engineer told me his phones were counted as activated multiple times/day at times. We was doing a reset with a change of phones?
Do you mean distros? Linux distress is what I feel when I see how they bloated KDE & Gnome in an attempt to compete
Linux didn't fail on the desktop because it's flawed for the desktop. Way back in 1995 Linux offered a demonstrably superior desktop experience to Windows 3.1, what it lacked was applications. Linux failed on the desktop for market reasons, not for technical reasons.
But for the most part, market reasons are the important thing. Marketing 101 tells you that simply building a better mousetrap doesn't mean you'll be successful.
What good is a computer without applications? All of us Apple users in the 90s experienced the frustration of having only a small subset of applications available for a long time. Windows wasn't successful because it was a better OS.
It's the same with mobile OS. Without applications, the platform will always be relegated to a niche. Which is why the iOS and Android have been so successful on smartphones, at the expense of Blackberry and webOS.
On tablets, the game is even more shifted toward iOS, as what other platform has 100,000 tablet apps? Other tablet sales might spike for a bit while they are "new", but unless a platform has a healthy library of applications, it doesn't have the fuel necessary for growth ? it's like a fire that quickly burns hot, but then dies when there's no wood. Unless QNX, webOS, and even Android for tablets builds up a competitive library of applications, they'll be relegated to a niche, like Apple was in the 90s.
But for the most part, market reasons are the important thing. Marketing 101 tells you that simply building a better mousetrap doesn't mean you'll be successful.
Exactly my point, so even a 'completely free' OS like Android, had barriers to entry, which it has spectacularly overcome. Handset makers needed to be convinced, carriers needed to be convinced, users, developers, content owners, etc. There are limits to how quickly that can happen, even for Android. Now it's certainly true that the limits to Android's rate of growth were less than the limits to iOS, but limits existed and still exist nevertheless.
Windows wasn't free, and yet that controlled the market totally. Android IS free, and yet is in second place (save for phones).
And MS did so within 20 months?
That might explain his "errors". So a simply reset or upgrade won't count unless you also change phones. That would explain why the engineer told me his phones were counted as activated multiple times/day at times. We was doing a reset with a change of phones?
No idea, like I said I'm not sure how much light it sheds, we're trying to stitch a tapestry out of scraps here. Nothing that this guy says directly contradicts what your guy said though. Switching a sim between phones is a very different thing to just re-flashing a phone. Google may use some kind of combination of SIM id, GSM id, MAC address etc which eliminates some duplications but not all.
Interesting point though, Google could clear all this up, and Google knows that clearing it up would increase the value of the metric to analysts etc, so they must have a reason for not doing that. One possible reason is that the real number is much lower once duplicates are stripped out, another reason is that they're already stripping duplicates really well, but the way that they do it would have privacy implications that might cause bad PR.
Maybe there are other possible reasons, but I can't help thinking that they must have a reason - because as a big seller of advertising, Google knows the value of auditable numbers.
It's a legitimate concern to know what counts as an activation. If you buy an Android phone and it's returned a week later because it's faulty for a replacement Android phone is that 2 activations? If you return it for an iPhone does that still count as 1 activation? Does flashing the ROM to then root the device count as an activation? Does each new gmail account added to the device (e.g., selling it) count as an activation?
I?d like those details too.
I have, I believe, 2 iPhone activations: a 3G and then a 4. I?m keeping my 3G as an iPod for multiplayer and other casual uses.
My two Android-using friends probably have six or eight between them, and counting! Because every single Android phone they try disappoints them, and they always get another one quickly. I shudder to think of the unsubsidized cost of that habit! But somewhere is a drawerful of their Android phones that couldn?t receive voice calls for unknown software reasons, or couldn?t last the day on a battery charge. Do these two people get counted as new activations every time? Or were their initial two activations counted, and no more after that?
Interesting point though, Google could clear all this up, and Google knows that clearing it up would increase the value of the metric to analysts etc, so they must have a reason for not doing that. One possible reason is that the real number is much lower once duplicates are stripped out, another reason is that they're already stripping duplicates really well, but the way that they do it would have privacy implications that might cause bad PR.
I don't see Google's reason as being altruistic at all. Big numbers sound good especially in advertising. Since Google is interested in number of eyes on the screen, the number of activations give an indication of the number of "newish" accounts are looking at devices even if the device has been used by 3 people prior to that.
I kind of agree with your sentiment; visiting Sweden right now, and was walking around a mall with 5-6 kiosks selling phones. Now that everything looks like the iPhone, I can't imagine how a consumer would be able to differentiate between models. From a sales perspective, it would be easy to say "all these phones are Android, except for that lonely one over there which is an Apple." It is the same old problem with buying a Mac at BestBuy 5-6 years ago... sure they have them, but the sales guy would never encourage it.
But, the solution is pretty easy... it just comes down to using advertising for consumer education. I do like the idea of having a few different models available from Apple though.
You can buy any Apple stuff at an Apple Store. That's what I call PARADISE! We need no stinking Best buy!