How Big Will Android Get? 21 comments
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In a week of CTIA-related mobile platform announcements, industry analyst Gartner predicts that in the next 39 months, Android will rise from less than 2% market share to 14% market share, becoming 2nd in the global market after Symbian.
I don’t buy it: 14% seems plausible, but I think it implausible to assume that neither iPhone nor BlackBerry will get to 14% by then, given their strong recent growth. Also, by some estimates RIM (RIMM) is already well above 14%.
But then, there is the spurious precision of the Gartner prediction for the year 2012 years from now that’s typical of the genre — which has Android edging out the iPhone, Blackberry and Windows Mobile by a fraction of a percent (not 2011 or 2013).
As Computerworld reported:
The complete Gartner forecast for smartphone OSes by the end of 2012 puts Symbian on top with 203 million devices sold, and 39% of the market. Android will be second with nearly 76 million units sold, and 14.5% of the market.
Coming in a close third, the iPhone will ship on 71.5 million devices in 2012, giving a 13.7% market share. Windows Mobile will finish fourth, with 66.8 million units sold, or 12.8% of the market.
Very close behind Windows Mobile, the BlackBerry OS will sell on 65.25 million devices in 2012, Gartner forecasts, making it fifth with 12.5% market share.
Various Linux devices will sell 28 million units, at 5.4% market share, in sixth place. Palm Inc.'s (PALM) webOS will sell on 11 million units in 2012, about 2.1% of the market, in seventh place, Gartner says.
Why 62.25 million? Not 62.3 million or 61.9 million? This sort of precision is GIGO.
Last year, Gartner said Android will get 10% share in 2011. At least that’s an estimate of a single significant digit, without the pseudo-precision.
In the end, what was published is just a guess — maybe more of a WAG than a SWAG. It doesn’t take an industry analyst to predict that Android will grow rapidly, but how fast and what the natural limit is remain unclear.
This also points out the stupidity of point estimates. If we accept the calculation as an unbiased estimate, then it is more reasonable to say Android will have 8-20% market share in 2012.
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This article has 21 comments:
What!? Did you take a math course or something and actually REMEMBER what it taught?
'Bout time someone did.
Good article.
AT the end of the day, the smart phone market may wind up being a bunch of Android generics selling on the cheap and only RIMM and AAPL making money (because they are different), plus GOOG. Handset mfgs have a habit of doing this and I hold MOT as the poster child. People should remember what a smart phone is supposed to do, tie in important apps, not all the silly nonsense that pundits think consumers want, 2 billion apps downloaded, well how many have been deleted??? Basing market share predictions on this gimmick laden thinking plus as you rightly point out WAG is useless info. The key question is: Are these companies going to make any significant money using Android?
In fact, the most recent iteration (1.6; 'Donut') works fine on all Android phones, going right back to the first G1 units. And, since this update was pushed out over-the-air, users had only to click 'yes' and watch their phones reboot into the new O/S...no special instructions or knowledge required, no weird key-press sequence, and no need to figure out which update was correct for their phone.
Tho you may have seen reports of minor glitches with some mytouch 3G phones, this was a relatively minor matter of differences in their installed firmware-level. These issues were quickly corrected by a new OTA update, specifically for those phones. Compare that with Apple's nearly annual problems in interfacing with AT&T...and that's a single model of handset.
Frankly, I think all of this not only puts the lie to your complaint, but also proves just the opposite: the Donut transition was surprisingly smooth for so new a platform with a diverse installed-base. And it points to another factor in Android's run to the top: more improvements and more models released in a single year than we've seen in over two years of iPhone sales.
On Oct 08 06:36 AM Beluga wrote:
> One important factor that is left out is the fragmentation of that
> Androit market. Already the first Androit handsets are unable to
> run the latest OS versions. So even if Androit achives high Market
> penetration, how homogenous will the installed base be compared to
> other platforms?
Thank you, Joel, you really nail Gartner. I've been tracking these witch doctors from the mid-90's when they were telling people Apple was doomed. I'd be curious to see who passes them cash for "favorable" predictions.
@lennywon - Handset manufacturers have a good chance of making money, now, if only because - thanks to Android - they can offer an attractive, competitive product without the costs associated with installing Windows Mobile.
And I think its plain that _they_ buy this argument, too. Otherwise, why have HTC (the most prolific WinMo licensee?), Sony/Ericsson, Motorola and others announced either a major push into Android sales or a complete abandonment of WinMo? Why are many of them laying off WInMo developers?
Similarly, we read that Verizon took resources away from their long-anticipated Palm Pre launch, in favor of their unheralded Android launch. All of this speaks to the industry's perception that Android's emergence has energized the market, opening up new opportunities for those not tied to a single, proprietary O/S.
On Oct 08 08:04 AM lennywon wrote:
> Whatever market share Android does in the near term as suggested,
> so what? [...] The key
> question is: Are these companies going to make any significant money
> using Android?
Go Android !
Symbian will preserve its 1st place for few more years to come but whoever thinks Android won't leave Apple behind is kidding himself.
Heck iPhone is not even a multitasking phone, let alone the latest news of Jobs' continuing refusal of admitting Flash as the most important online format - of course, he has no choice, despite his high-end hardware in iPhone 3GS his iPhone OS is so wasteful, so very heavy on the hardver he does not have any spare clock left for real multitasking (imagine a slow iPhone, horror! :))
Windows Mobile is completely FUBARed, thanks to its ancient, total crap architecture - it's DEAD, period. MS' only chance if they throw 6.5 out the Windo(s) ;) and go back to the drawing board to start from sratch. It's a mobile OS, for God's sake, and the old ones are crappy, noone cares about backward compatibility anymore, WRITE A NEW ONE WITH PROPER APP HANDLING!
Palm and WebOS is very nice but Palm, as always, once again royally screwed up everything: no SDK at launch, no apps at launch, nothing at launch. It's 6 months later and still ridiculous number of apps (maybe 30?), SDK just been released and until now they didn't even have an open store policy for devs... PALM BUSINESS UNIT = SHEER INCOMPETENCY, AS ALWAYS.
If they can replace these idiots at the top and can bring in someone skilled and smart plus spend some big money on app development then they might have a chance for survival on the long run.
The only strong competitor in smartphones is RIM - their stuff is everywhere, even more than iPhone's and they are enterprise-ready, unlike any other mobile OS.
On Oct 08 08:52 AM Justa Notherguy wrote:
> I think the important factor, here, is that you have no clue what
> you're talking about.
BINGO, well said!
All I see here is a lot of utterly clueless blokes are writing hilarious idiocies regarding something they obviously don't have the A SLIGHTEST CLUE about, let alone even basic technical proficiency.
Way too many loudmouthed losers with their own little stupid agenda, that's what it is.
The world is made up of two sides, the public side and the private side, all the interceptions in between are also categorized as public and private.
iPhone will completely capture the private side of computing and Linux/Unix will completely capture the public side.
Rim will be the first of a whole generation of phone making misfits which are extremely hardwired to the old unusable OSs like the blackberry OS in meeting the needs today, and tomorrow. Unlike Motorola which shed the old technologies without any baggages, and Palm shedding its old Palm OS offerings, Rim lives and dies by its blackberry OS, therefore Rim is getting killed first by Apple, then by and Android movement. There is no doubt in this.
On Oct 08 08:48 AM Kris Tuttle wrote:
> Everyone should just do their own market forecast. Then if we aggregate
> them we'll know the future!
> iPhone OS is a fully certified Unix,
Ehhhh?
WTF?
It's not even a real multi-tasking OS....
You are either completely and hopelessly clueless or you are playing from the cheesiest crappy PR playbook of Apple - you know, the one aimed at ignorant small investors who tend to eat this kind of BS, namely that iPhone's OS equals OS X - it IS NOT. Stop spreading BS, please.
iPhone OS != OS X
> running on multi-million dollar
> superservers serving the world's biggest public and private
> enterprises.
Yeah, right... iPhone OS is running on servers...
Seriously: just WTF are you talking about? :D
iPhone OS is running on "multibi-bi-bi-mmmmiii... dollar superservers" - I think I will start using this in my signline over at macrumors.com...
BTW since we are at it: please, show me a SINGLE million-dollar server that runs OS X - no, not multi-million, just ONE server with a $1M dollar pricetag including OS X.
Just FYI: Apple's Server SUCKS. It's a nice toy for SMBs and might serve other purposes but Apple has nothing to do with serious hardware at all - it's a newcomer with Intel and even Intel does not really scale well beyond the SMB market's size (= ~32-way max per server). Their (Intel) only half-decent solution was the 64-bit Itanium-family (at least it scales up to 128) but it's been pretty much dead for years now (its next Tukwila core is being postponed since early 2007), literally HP's Superdome being the only 'en masse' shipped IA HPC system (like 95%+ of all IA64 sales), which is even less impressive if we consider that HP was Itanium's original father, khm. Of course, it's not OS X...
If you want correct scaling on a massive scale, talk to Sun (SPARC) or IBM (Power) - and neither runs OS X, mind you.
> Android, webOS are derivatives of the open source Linux community
> running on various classes of business machines.
Well, unless you meant the community running on various machines :D your sentence, once again, not making any sense.
FYI: Android IS linux (but that's a general term for a group of Unixes or "Unix-like" OSes that are using the Linux kernel) and WebOS is also using the linux kernel but they cannot be more different: while Android is open source and OEM-ready since its inception, WebOS is a proprietary Palm operating system (sans its kernel.)
By design Android is capable to run on just about anything from a phone to warship, WebOS is only trying to be a mobile OS, nothing more, nothing less.
Ahhh, did I mention that Android actually DOES run on a "supercomputer", Freescale's Power platform...?
> For example, the
> IBM zOS mainframe can host 12000 concurrent Linux partitions (how's
> that for virtualization?), all the way down to a $299 Acer Aspire
> Netbook. Asia and Europe host millions of open source Linux implementations.
> Linux is by far the leading server OS over all other OS including
> Unix itself like HPUX. Linux open source projects proliferate throughout
> the universe and is the foundation for cloud computing and the future
> for social as well as commercial computing.
>
> The world is made up of two sides, the public side and the private
> side, all the interceptions in between are also categorized as public
> and private.
>
> iPhone will completely capture the private side of computing and
> Linux/Unix will completely capture the public side.
>
> Rim will be the first of a whole generation of phone making misfits
> which are extremely hardwired to the old unusable OSs like the blackberry
> OS in meeting the needs today, and tomorrow. Unlike Motorola which
> shed the old technologies without any baggages, and Palm shedding
> its old Palm OS offerings, Rim lives and dies by its blackberry OS,
> therefore Rim is getting killed first by Apple, then by and Android
> movement. There is no doubt in this.
Very nice and long just completely irrelevant - iPhone's OS has NOTHING to do with normal Unixes and its big bro OS X has nothing to do with any kind of HPC market (forget supercomputing.)
Beyond RIM's Blackberry OS Android is the *ONLY* mobile OS that has any kind of "enterprise-readiness" - iPhone, as a result of its super snappiness, is severely crippled even for a modern smartphone OS and WinMo v6.5 is just a broken architecture, period.
On Oct 08 05:42 PM JamesApple wrote:
> BTW. Not everybody sees things as clearly or as detailed as I do.
> There are always some who blindly buy anything, even blackberrys.
> There is no rationale to reason with the unreasonable ones.
is just PRICELESS, Sir. :D
> Rim is anything but enterprise ready.
I guess you are smarter than the US Government, the Pentagon and all the Fortune 500 companies who utilize exclusively RIM's Blackberries...
> Business processes have no
> place for email only blackberrys. If anything, blackberrys get in
> the way of business processes forcing employees to waste time waddling
> thru hundreds of useless junk mails, meaningless messages and correspondences.
> It had been reported regular employees waste 3 to 5 hours on nonproductive
> email messages alone, and people wonder what happened to their lowered
> productivity.
Have you ever heard of this think called "spam filtering"? It's a magic thing, it throws out most of the unwanted crap...
FYI: most companies use a little bit more sophisticated systems than you can probably even imagine - I know because I used to manage one.
RIM OS isn't perfect at all, no 'bubbles', no constant stream of Facebook or Twitter BS or any other useless social stuff - but very solid enterprise features including full remote control (eg wiping of a lost phone), encryption, lot of customization-ready options from the beginning.
The single-tasking iPhone is not even close to this especially not with its own iDisk cloud crap - no sane company would host its secrets outside of its own admins' reach, for starter.
> Although the OS market share will gradually level out into a close
> race between three or four players, Apple will still have a huge
> advantage. They will make every single AppleOS phone, while the other
> systems will be spread out among many manufacturers. Per-Phone market
> share will be highly in favor of Apple.
You are not making any sense - how is it an advantage for an OS that there's only ONE mfr's ONE model that runs it?
Pure illogical nonsense.
Dell is COMING. And IT IS Android.