February 2012
8 posts
Watch$2m raised on Kickstarter in a few days for an indie game development project. Fascinating.
WatchDavid Remmick, editor of the New Yorker
Upgrades
Motorola announced the Droid Razr on the same day that the latest Nexus phone, the launch flagship for ICS, was launched. (For the uninitiated, ICS is the latest version of Android, released late last year).
Motorola currently does not know if the Droid Razr will be able to run ICS.
In case you’ve forgotten, Google is buying Motorola.
(Via The Verge)
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Platform wars, app stores and ecosystems
Experimenting a little with sharing slides: this is a presentation I’ve given at a few conferences on the ‘platform wars’.
The data is taken from a much more dense deck provided to clients of Enders Analysis - feel free to contact me for details.
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Does Android fragmentation matter to Google? Not...
Clearly, Android fragmentation affects users and developers. It makes it more expensive and less profitable to develop for Android, while users get inconsistent and unpredictable experiences and have access to fewer high-quality apps. Moreover Android devices may not even have Google services such as Maps or Gmail embedded on the device when a consumer buys it, while new versions of the software...
January 2012
15 posts
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“The Apple TV product is doing actually very well. In last fiscal year that ended...”
– Tim Cook, Q1 fiscal 2012 (i.e. December 2011) results call
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Windows Phone
An idle observation: Windows Phone has an embedded Facebook client that forms part of the address book, home page and half the screens in the OS. Microsoft tries very hard to get you to enable it when you turn on your new phone.
According to Facebook, there are now 1.3m active users of this client: see here (yes, this is the integrated one, not the one you can download yourself)
This number has...
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“They built Microsoft TV, they demoed it for us, they asked for rate cards but...”
– Media exec on Microsoft’s TV subscription plans
WatchInterview: Samsung’s David Steel on Apple, the future of TVs, and what’s next (The Verge)
Upgrade paths
“Samsung Smart TV will evolve every year w/out having to buy a new TV. You’ll never be left behind”
Meanwhile:
“A full update to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich for the GALAXY Tab(7-inch) and GALAXY S is not practicable due to hardware limitations”
The Galaxy S was the flagship Samsung Android smartphone, on sale well into 2011.
So, Samsung’s...
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Ice Cream Sandwich
Google has disclosed Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) devices as a percentage of the install base today. The figure is 0.6%.
What’s that in units? Google is very vague (to the point of obfuscation) about Android, but Google disclosed 200m activated devices in the second week of November, and Andy Rubin tweeted that there was a run rate of 700k daily activations on 21 December. A straight...
Engagement
This is a scrapbook, more than anything else. I don’t really post serious analysis here (unlike, say, Horace Dediu), since I’m paid to do it elsewhere for other people. So I don’t really care much about traffic, and it only averages about a thousand uniques a month. But…
My previous post had some unique and moderately interesting data on Facebook. It was picked up by Techcrunch who posted a...
December 2011
10 posts
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Facebook's 300m app users
Sometime in the last couple of days, the monthly active users (MAU) of Facebook’s mobile apps passed 300m.
Quite unsurprisingly, these are dominated by the two platforms that have traction, iOS and Android. As Techcrunch pointed out a few days ago, Android has now passed iOS in DAUs, though Apple has passed the round 100m MAU figure.
Windows Phone remains quite insignificant, though...
WatchSaul Bass pitches the iconic Bell System logo
bit.ly/sjUGqZ Just published research on tablet sales for Enders: 40m iPads, 3-4m Androids, 4-500k PlayBooks. Payment in mince pies.
— Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) December9, 2011
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How many Playbooks? 400k sold, 1m+ unsold?
A few datapoints for the over-excited out there:
First, Facebook’s app for the Playbook has 170k monthly active users. So there must be at least that many Playbooks in consumer hands, and more probably something over double that. iPhone, Android and Blackberry handsets all have about 50% penetration, and the Playbook both has a decent browser and is aimed (partly) at corporate users, so...
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WatchHenry Blodget interviews Twitter ‘chief revenue officer’ Adam Bain
November 2011
10 posts
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Q3 2011 handsets and smartphones: the dominance of...
The Q3 smartphone market, as should be obvious but somehow isn’t, splits between Apple selling a high-priced product and everyone else selling much cheaper products. Android’s ASP (Average Selling Price) is just under $300. The wholesale price of the iPhone 3GS - the one people call ‘free’ - is about $375-400. In other words, the cheapest iPhone is still 1/3 more...
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“Does iMessage affect SMS revenue? Yes, if you do nothing. No, if you have...”
– Vodafone
“32% of smartphone sales are in the €65-95 range (unsubsidised)”
– Vodafone. For reference, the ‘cheap’ iPhone 3GS costs about $400
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Apple and China
How many iPhones is Apple selling in China? There’s a little algebra that gets us some of the way to a decent answer.
Apple said that Q4 (i.e. the September quarter) revenue from China was $4.5bn, and reported total Apac (ex Japan) revenue of $6.5bn. So, China was 15.9% of total quarterly revenue and about 70% of the Apac segment.
Apac Mac units were reported as 14.9% of total Mac sales....
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The Nokia Lumia, app lock-in and Google Plus
I’ve been playing with one of the new Nokia Lumia 800s for the past few days (and tweeting a fair bit about it). It isn’t my job to do a ‘review’ - you can find dozens of those online, but I will say that the industrial design is as good as anything Apple has produced - perhaps better. The Windows Phone UI is very polished, though it lacks a lot of the incremental features...
October 2011
25 posts
the understatement: Android Orphans: Visualizing a... →
A very good (and laborious) diagram illustrating just how poor the aftermarket support for Android devices has been.
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WatchThe Nokia N9 manufacturing process - much like the Lumia. Designed in London, assembled in Finland.
Apple retail
A little nugget: in Apple’s 10k it disclosed total retail square footage for the first time since last September. The figure (rather round, unfortunately) is 3m, all leased, up from 2.5m last year.
From this we can work out some new metrics:
8,400 square feet per store, up from 7,900 last year
$1195 quarterly revenue per square foot, down from $1426 (driven by the iPhone delay)
...
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WatchMe saying (hopefully) sensible stuff on Bloomberg about Nokia. I can never get used to how different your voice sounds on TV.
And no, I haven’t watched it.
Meeker annual
KPCB Internet Trends (2011)