NPD: Android ousts iPhone OS for second place in US smartphone market

I would have expected the iPhone to be way ahead of Android but I guess not. Apple will probably regain the second spot once the annual refresh of the iPhone comes out which is fairly soon though.

This isn't an argument for or against the iPhone or Android though. Just surprised by the numbers.

It's most notably a carrier-influenced result, where Android is available for Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile, in multiple flavors, with heavy subsidies, including "free" phones. I would expect given the same forward momentum, Android will overtake the RIM OS as number 1 in the US at some point in the future.

iPhone as a product should still be able to do well when compared to individual handset models from others, but I don't think it can keep Android at bay in sheer all-model device numbers, especially when limited only to the AT&T network. This is likely only to change with the rollout of 4G technologies, because we're not going to see a CDMA iPhone.

Android is most definitely eating away at the share of dumber devices as well. Luckily many of the manufacturers of such devices are now shipping Android phones, so they're still able to maintain/grow market share. I think the companies who should be most worried about this news are Nokia and Microsoft.

Overall market share of in use devices still has the iPhone ahead of Android. Definitely a sign though that Android is gaining a lot of traction, pretty impressive jump over the past two quarters (in the US):


And hopefully this situation will be fixed soon. Verizon indicated the Droid Eris is selling well, and thats still shipping with 1.6.

In terms of manufacturers, Nokia is still ahead with around 34% of all smartphones. The original number was around 38% but Nokia did a press release which stated that the numbers weren't accurate as it was counting clones.

1. Nokia - 33%
2. RIM - 19.4%
3. Apple - 16.1%
4. HTC - 4.8%
5. Motorola - 4.2%

Link

Hmm. These statistics don't quite tally with each other. If Nokia sold 33% of all smartphones, how come they're not listed in the Tom's graph as Symbian or whatever?

Tom's figures are US market, Nokia's are global market.

Peter

Ahh. Makes much more sense now! Thanks

Just a couple notes:

1) I don't know of any "free" Android devices.

2) You forgot that AT&T has Android too, though I can understand why. They've insisted on doing horrible things with their one or two Android phones. The Backflip is one of the worst smartphones out there.

Samsung Behold II - Free with contract from T-Mobile. Backflip free from AT&T. Didn't see any free Android phones from Verizon or Sprint though, but both did have the Palm Pixi for free.

When you buy a phone on Verizon, you can get another phone for "free" - so ya, that's a lot of free Android phones.

Google need to do something about this although I'm not sure what exactly they can do. The Android userbase is badly fragmented on the core OS version alone. Once you add in the various manufacturer changes which don't need to contributed back to the core then it is even worse.

HTC has their Sense UI layer.
Sony Ericsson has UX which is on their only Android handset and that is stuck with Android 1.6 until the end of the year.
Motorola has MOTOBLUR but their latest handset doesn't use it for some reason.
Samsung appear to be using the stock UI but are awful with releasing updates as most of their phones are stuck with Android 1.5.

I'd forgotten about the Behold and the Backflip being free, but I have no clue what you're talking about here. I've never heard of a "buy one get one free" deal on Verizon. I honestly don't understand your sentence there.

I'd also say that I doubt either of those phones represent a huge amount of Android's market share. Like I said, the Backflip is crap (because AT&T made it so).


This has been discussed here before. The solution is less than ideal, but an upcoming version of Android (I believe 2.2 will have it) will allow for the core OS and the apps to be separated, and the apps can be updated independently. This means users will get the latest version of GMail and Calendar the same way you get Maps now, from the Market.

This way at least the users will get most of the front-facing feature upgrades.

Right from the link Trevor posted:

They can do that now though. I know you can update the Google Maps application from the market.

It doesn't really help much with the core OS though. You need Android 2.0 to support more than 256MB of memory in a device. Same for multitouch and a whole bunch of other core OS libraries. There are apps on the market that require specific versions of the OS and don't even appear if you're running an older version. Several handsets have been discontinued in terms of software support and they're now forever stuck at 1.5 or 1.6 if you want official firmware. If your device doesn't have a known exploit to root it then you won't even be able to use third party firmware.

Aha! My fault entirely. I don't think it's the biggest contributor to that sales growth, but I'm sure it helps.