How do the market share numbers look when you factor in iPads and iPod touches? The numbers look impressive for Android, but assuming app purchasing behaviors are the same on both platforms and mobile economics do end up looking like web economics Apple is still placing WAY more units in the field and covering a much broader demographic, from 6 year olds with the iPod touch to grandmoms with the iPad. I wouldn't underestimate iOS and their ability to make consumers happy.
You make a good point. But if you're looking at it as a winner-take-all (or winner-take-most) market like a lot people do, the phone is where the battle lies. Once your phone is beefy enough to be your media player, game machine, phone, and GPS, most people won't have differentiated / specialized devices.
Q4 iPod sales were down 11% year over year. I'd look for that to accelerate as smartphones become more ubiquitous.
If you want #s of everything, here's what a quick googling yielded:
Android shipped 33.5M devices in Q4
Apple shipped 27.34M iPhones/iPads/iPods in Q4
(~14M iphones, ~4M iPads, ~9M iPods)
Presumably some meaningful percentage of iPods were NOT iPod touches (i.e. no App Store), so shave 3-5M off of Apple if you're trying to guess iOS devices.
So conservatively, about a third more Android devices shipped in q4 than all iOS devices combined. That's BEFORE the 7% market share boost that Fred is talking about.
(this is quick/sloppy research-- feel free to point to better #s).
Where did you get these numbers? In my research, I couldn't find good comparisons at all. I saw some info in various places attributed to Canalys that showed 33 million iOS vs 32.7 Android unit sales in Q4. I also saw Schmidt claim 300k daily Android phone activations in Q4 with Apple's Q4 earnings report extrapolating to 375k daily iOS sales. Did Android have 75k daily sales of non-phone Android devices? Maybe if we include Nooks and things? Is this even really a useful comparison between two things anymore? Would a consumer recognize a Nook as being the same thing as a Droid, in the same way they recognize an iPod Touch is the same thing as an iPhone? This isn't an idle question since, e.g., millions of the Android activations are coming from phones in China with totally different user experiences. In my opinion, Android is not homogeneous enough to compare against iOS in the way that Windows vs Mac OS used to be.
Those Apple figures are for calendar Q3, Apple's financial Q4 so you're not comparing the same time period. Apple generally get a big bump in iPad and iPod sales in the christmas quarter.
I'm fairly confident that Android is far enough ahead in smartphones sales (i.e. more than double globally, more than triple in the U.S.) that you can include iPods and they're still ahead and the gap is growing. I'll wait till I see a few quarters of numbers for the Android tablets before I'd be happy assessing how they're doing against iPad sales.
edit: Here's what Apple call their Q1 results, covering Q4 2010:
iPod sales declined 7% year-on-year, the 33 million iOS (pod+pad+phone) number mentioned above which would roughly equal Android smartphone sales last quarter works out if you assume half of all iPods are iPod Touches (I have no idea if that is true, either historically or currently).
Ophone (the China Mobile Android fork) sales were about 1/3 million last year, which is less than half a percent of the 70 million Android sales in 2010. They were only aiming for 1 million so even if they hit that target it wouldn't make much difference. Android sales generally are growing fast while Ophone is supposedly a failure because it can't keep up with mainline Android development.
The Canalys numbers only covered smartphones (16.2 for Apple in Q4 2010) so the rest of the figures must have been added by someone else.
And the Schmidt number was over 300,000 daily activations at the start of Q4 (it had jumped around 100,000 in the previous two months and growth appeared to be accelerating). Canalys numbers translate to about 366K per day averaged over Q4. It appears later sales rates must be over 400K to bring that average up to that level.
That is true. And Archos's own AppsLib just does not measure up, from a developer's viewpoint. I've got two apps that have gotten over 100 downloads each in the Market, and only 2 from AppsLib.
