Android is not winning because of the ecosystem. The real reasons Android is "winning":
(1) it came close to parity with the iphone quickly.
(2) the flexible licensing model allowed Android to leverage supply perfectly and compete at every price point from $700+ superphones down to sub $100 budget phones and everything in between all the time with new releases every week on any carrier in the world. If you can only build X million iphones in quarter x and the smartphone market is 100 million phones that quarter you can only get X% at best. It looks like X was around 15-20%.
Now for the 80%+ of the market Apple couldn't even hope to address:
WebOS beat Android by a couple months at (1) but failed miserably at (2). By launching a CDMA phone on Sprint only you're fighting over a tiny slice of a tiny slice of the pie (low single digit percent of the entire world).
Microsoft took 18 months too long to deliver (1) but brings most of (2) (supposedly they are targeting high end only but Android currently out high ends them). Many have written them off I'm not one of them.
RIM had arguably the best brand pre-Aple but they are only now (and only on tablets) starting to deliver on (1) and were just as limited as Apple on (2).
Nokia had all the supply they could want but categorically failed at putting out an iOS/WebOS/Android/WP7 quality product.
So looking again at those hypothetical 100 million devices, 15%+ Apple, 15%+ RIM, Less then 10% total WebOS/WP7/old Windows Mobile/other and the other ~60% started with Nokia and month by month was slowly eaten by Android (prolly 40-20 Android by now)
Android is winning just because of the free license. If Samsung, Motorola, and HTC could load iOS on their own hardware, Android would be dead tomorrow.
I think price is going to be key in the long term. Right now there's not that much difference in price between an iPhone and a comparable Android phone, but at the rate the hardware is improving, it will soon be possible to sell very capable phones at a very low price point. Apple is going to have a very hard time competing at that end of the market and, as usual, I expect the low end will eventually come to drive the high end.
Even today you can get a very capable Android phone for a quarter of the price of an iPhone. Phones like the ZTE Blade, Samsung Galaxy Mini and SE Xperia X8 are perfectly capable phones. Sure non of them can go head to head with the iPhone, but for a quarter of the price they certainly hold their own.
The interesting question is will the person who bought a Galaxy Mini upgrade to a Galaxy SIII or an iPhone 5 in a couple of years time.
"I think price is going to be key in the long term."
I think long term platform is irrelevant, for the most part your phone (and computer and tv and everything) will just decode an HD video stream from the cloud where datacenters crunch everything and send it at low pings over true 4G or mesh networks. ARM processors are already good enough to do this, the networks are "a few" years away. Google's got a huge lead over everyone at cloud but they're giving the OS away. Apple will make money because they will continue to make easy to use software (and poss good looking hardware).
I think it's just because smartphones are now just normal phones, and using Android for free is the best option for all those phone makers who were going to keep making phones in some capacity regardless of how well the iPhone did.
And Apple is manufacturing at full capacity - the prices suggest that there is still lots of pent up demand for iOS devices, but they cannot produce enough to meet that demand
However, those things don't seem to matter as much with stand-alone devices that are sold sans-contract, such as the tablet market. Nobody could outmarket and outsell the iPod when they went head to head. Didn't matter if the device was cheaper or better, iPod outsold them. If the tablet market dynamics are similar, Android won't fare as well on tablets as it does on phones.
Simply put, if the and Android tablet is the same price as an iPad, most consumers will buy the iPad. All Apple products are seen as expensive luxury goods. Nerds might disagree, but that's how people tend to view Apple.
If you could buy a BMW for the same price as a Chevy, you'd probably buy the BMW. Most people would.
Most people buy into Android phones because iPhone is only available on 2 carriers. If iPhone was available on all carriers, Android phone sales would be much, much less.
Most people buy into Android phones because iPhone is only available on 2 carriers. If iPhone was available on all carriers, Android phone sales would be much, much less.
The iPhone is available on all carriers in my country (Australia) and Android is outselling it.
This is due to a number of factors, but two factors appear to be critical:
1) Lower Priced Android handsets undercut Apple at the low end.
2) The iPhone 4 is now regarded as an old handset at the high end. Sales of high-end Android handsets appear to be competitive with iPhone sales on their own, at the same price point (ie, even without the low-end advantage Android might be outselling the iPhone at the high end. This is difficult to judge, because of the mid-range Android phones, and price discounting on older high-end Android phones. For example, the Samsung Galaxy S (not S2) is now available at around half the price of an iPhone 4, but a year ago was directly comparable)
"Most people buy into Android phones because iPhone is only available on 2 carriers. If iPhone was available on all carriers, Android phone sales would be much, much less."
Sales figures in countries outside the USA where the iphone is on all networks shows that statement to be extremely unlikely to be true in the USA
You're both half right. The thing to remember is it's limited on carriers because the overall supply is limited. Many people that wanted a new phone and might well have bought an iphone if it were available certainly walked out with the closest substitute: android phones.
OTOH all indications are that when in stock the iphone kills android head to head. The conventional wisdom was that this happened on AT&T because if you were with sprint or verizon and wanted an iphone you left and went to AT&T. This again was half true. However the other half was that when the iPhone came to Verizon it killed Android head to head again.
Winning can be measured different ways. I've owned both devices simultaneously (recently switch Verizon HTC incredible to iPhone ).
Android app store outright sucks. Many minor usability things on android are annoying. I don't think Android is 'winning' but I do think they are shipping a lot of handsets. IMO there is a distinction.
Chevy 'wins' over Bentley. Which would you rather drive?
It depends. If the Chevy drivers don't buy as many accessories as the Bentley drivers do, you better believe I'll be selling to Bentley drivers. And if those Bentley drivers use their accessories more, all the better.
There may be more Android phones, but mobile web usage of iOS (or even just iPhone) dwarfs that of Android. Ditto with app purchasing/usage.
Globally it looks set to overtake in the next few weeks (it's a couple of percent above just iPhone, but 4.5% iPod Touch share keeps mobile iOS slightly ahead), though both are trailing Symbian by some distance on that global measure.
UPDATE: Ahh, I see the problem. You linked to a OS market share graph, not a browsing market share. I didn't dispute there are more Android devices, I said the iOS devices are used to browse the web much more than the Android devices, even if they are fewer. Also, not including iPad share by StatCounter is silly. The iPad's browsing share is quite large.
It's not sales or installed base share, it's browser share.
I could put the difference down to just iPads, which apparently have much higher browsing rates than mobile devices, but the numbers don't agree there either e.g. my source has iOS as lower than Linux whereas your numbers has it as twice as high.
(Once you add iPad numbers you start to wonder why netbooks aren't included and then the fact that iOS and Android numbers total are dwarfed by any single version of IE begins to make it seem ridiculous.)
Why not both? Or just pick the one ypu're better with?
I don't get why fanboys of each platform wants the other to die... The worst thing that could happen is a smartphone platform monopoly... Hello stagnation... Hello nineties...
To be clear, I completely agree with you. I was just pointing out that this Chevy v Bentley analogy wasn't this slam dunk where everyone just says, "Of course a Bentley, Chevy sucks".
It wasn't meant to be a "slam dunk". I was trying to illustrate that some people define "win" by sheer volume, some define "win" by panache and polish and things like that.
Depending on how you want to measure it, Chevy or Bentley, Android or iOS, both "win" for some definition of "win".
1. No OS license costs 2 plugged into java dev ecosystem which has large dev base 3 Mobile Operators love android OEM terms