cross pond high tech

For the last couple of years, sales of Android-based smartphones have been smoking every other kind of smartphone, including the iPhone. Android phones now account for nearly 75% of the global smartphone market. The next closest competitor is iPhones, which have about 15% of the market.
In the U.S., Android is clubbing iPhone 53% to 34%.

 

Given such a disparity in phone sales and usage, you would think that things people do with smartphones--smartphone-based activities--would be equally dominated by Android.
But they aren't. They're not even equal.
In fact, iPhone users completely dominate Internet-based smartphone activities.

 

A recent survey of mobile web usage found that a staggering 60% of mobile web visits came from iOS devices, while only 20% came from Android. A study IBM did of Black Friday online sales showed much the same thing--except that it was even more skewed.

 

iOS (iPads and iPhones) accounted for nearly 20% of Black Friday sales. Android devices, meanwhile, accounted for only 5.5%.

A brief, visual history of the personal computing battlefield since 1975

The ratio of Windows PCs sold compared to Macs steadily increased throughout the second half of the 1990s and during the first few years of the 2000s, thanks in part to the success of Windows 95. But as we reported recently, analyst Horace Dediu of Asymco crunched some numbers and found that this ratio has been declining for the past eight years thanks to Apple's resurgence.

According to Dediu, the ratio of Windows PCs to Macs sold dropped to below 20 in 2011, its lowest level since before Windows 95 was launched. But that only tells part of the story.

In a new post, Dediu compares the ratio of Windows units sold to all Apple devices, not just Macs. When you factor in iPhones and iPads, the ratio of Windows units to Apple devices sold has dropped to less than two.

"Seen this way, Post-PC devices wiped out of leverage faster than it was originally built," Dediu writes. "They not only reversed the advantage but cancelled it altogether."

Here is the introduction speech I gave for the "Platforms & Shovels for the next Gold Rush" plenary session panel I ran on Nov 15th in Montpellier during IDATE DigiWorld Summit 2012.

 

Available in both video & text.

The rate of iOS and Android device adoption has surpassed that of any consumer technology in history.  Compared to recent technologies, smart device adoption is being adopted 10X faster than that of the 80s PC revolution, 2X faster than that of 90s Internet Boom and 3X faster than that of recent social network adoption. 

 

Five years into the smart device growth curve, expansion of this new technology is rapidly expanding beyond early adopter markets such as such as North America and Western Europe, creating a true worldwide addressable market.

 

Overall, Flurry estimates that there were over 640 million iOS and Android devices in use during the month of July 2012.

Evernote, the popular note taking app, released data about average annual revenue per user across different platforms. Evernote has more than 34 million users so it's a pretty good window into monetization trends.

Apple's iOS platform, on the iPhone and iPad, generated some of the highest revenues per user. Blackberry was surprisingly high, but this is likely because many of them are enterprise workers (whom a note taking app would appeal to). Android was at the bottom, even below Windows Phone.

Evernote's data reaffirms that Android has a major monetization problem with app developers. Flurry recently found that for developers with apps on both platforms, Android apps generate only 24 percent of the revenue generated by iOS. App Annie was a little more generous, finding that Google Play (the main Android app store) generates about 40 percent the revenue for developers as Apple's App Store. However, AppAnnie also found that revenues were growing at the same rate on both platforms. In other words, the monetization gap is not closing.