Benedict Evans

Ugandan mobile money ad from MTN (no, I have no idea what...

Thu, 24 May 2012 21:27:37 +0100

Ugandan mobile money ad from MTN (no, I have no idea what they’re saying)

Chinese Android share

Thu, 24 May 2012 14:05:00 +0100

A little number crunching from Baidu’s Q1 2012 mobile internet stats:

(Mainland) Chinese brands now have no less than 48% market share, and they’re not staying at home…

Great data from Baidu on the state of the Chinese mobile...

Thu, 24 May 2012 12:53:26 +0100

Great data from Baidu on the state of the Chinese mobile internet - click through for the PDF.

BT is using street-corner cabinets to promote its new FTTC...

Tue, 22 May 2012 18:00:17 +0100

BT is using street-corner cabinets to promote its new FTTC product. This one is in Chiswick, west London.

This is a clever approach to local advertising - only people who can get the service will see the posters. Not sure how effective it is, though.

iPhone share of smartphone sales in the USA

Tue, 22 May 2012 12:48:10 +0100

(This is an extract from a report I published last week for Enders Analysis)

A little observation and collation:

All 3 US (major) operators that sell the iPhone report their unit sales, and AT&T and Verizon report total smartphone sales. The iPhone is utterly dominant.

Even at Verizon Wireless, which has aggressively promoted Android, the iPhone is now over 50% of all smartphone sales.

As time goes on, we can estimate what this is doing to the installed base of smartphones (which they also disclose):

Expanded distribution and the new iPhone 4S combined mean that the iPhone now has 42% of all US smartphones in use today, and growing.

As should be obvious, this means that though Android is outselling the iPhone 2:1 globally, the iPhone is substantially outselling Android in the USA.

(Note: the second chart is for the total US market, including T-Mobile and other smaller carriers)

HBO on why they’re not going to unbundle from cable...

Fri, 18 May 2012 12:43:51 +0100

HBO on why they’re not going to unbundle from cable networks any time soon.

iPhone market share in the USA: 50% of Q1 sales

Thu, 17 May 2012 15:25:00 +0100

An experiment of sorts: today I published a very detailed report for Enders Analysis on the iPhone’s market share in the USA. Enders is a subscription business, so I can’t post it all here, but I’ll be sharing some of the more compelling charts over the next few days. Today: smartphone market share.

Since the US operators disclose their iPhone unit sales and their smartphone bases, and AT&T, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile disclose total smartphone sales as well, you can make some pretty good estimates as to where the market is going - far better than relying on panel data, as some of the more widely-quoted stats do.

So, this is my starting point:

Roughly 50% of all the smartphones sold in the USA in Q1 2012 were iPhones. This is very different to the global picture:

Android is outselling iPhone by more than 2:1 on a global basis. But in the USA, Apple is massively outselling Android. That has obvious implications for where (mainly US-based) developers should be placing their efforts.

Tomorrow, the install base, and what effect expanded distribution has had.

richardturley: Facebook - The $98 Billion Hack

Thu, 17 May 2012 14:41:16 +0100

richardturley:

Facebook - The $98 Billion Hack

Tablets and magazines

Tue, 15 May 2012 11:17:00 +0100

Hearst US tablet mag sales, given at a conference I moderated today:

35% iPad
30% Nook
20% Zinio (mainly iPad)
15% Fire.

They’re selling 600k copies a month. Of course, this is not a totally representative sample: the small devices in particular weight to mid-market women’s titles.

Still, Hearst USA is selling as many digital magazines on Nook + Fire as on iPad. Fascinating, and big implications for the viability of the 7 inch tablet market

A very simple reason why Apple doesn’t need to make its...

Mon, 14 May 2012 19:35:27 +0100

A very simple reason why Apple doesn’t need to make its own television. Just licence AirPlay.

"I’m not sure I know what AirPlay is"

Mon, 14 May 2012 17:04:40 +0100

“I’m not sure I know what AirPlay is”

- Glenn A. Britt, chief executive of Time Warner Cable

The cost of developing on Android: QA testing on 400 different...

Fri, 11 May 2012 23:30:35 +0100

The cost of developing on Android: QA testing on 400 different devices.

“Android users tend to be delighted when they find apps that actually work flawlessly.”

"We created the Android platform from the beginning, and we’re looking to do the same thing..."

Wed, 09 May 2012 18:44:36 +0100

“We created the Android platform from the beginning, and we’re looking to do the same thing with a third ecosystem”

- Francis Shammo, Verizon WIreless CFO, responding to a question about Windows Phone, April 2012

Piratebay is now blocked by the major UK ISPs.

Fri, 04 May 2012 15:07:15 +0100

Piratebay is now blocked by the major UK ISPs.

Estimating Android tablet market share: 30%, 40%, 10%?

Thu, 03 May 2012 00:08:00 +0100

Consider the following:

According to the platform statistics that Google provides for developers, 5.8% of Android devices connecting to the Android Market (now ‘Google Play’) have screens that are 7 inches or larger, and a further 2.5% are 5-7 inches.
Google disclosed 300m cumulative device activations in February. At the current run rate, that would be 325-330m now.
Almost all of those sales are within the last 24 months, so there’s very little replacement in there - almost all those devices should be in use

Hence, it is possible to say that 8.3% of 330m devices are tablets - so somewhere between 25m and 30m Android tablets have been sold.

Meanwhile, Apple has sold 67m iPads since launch, and again almost all of these are in use. That would mean that Android tablets are almost a third of the install base. Indeed, since Android sales only really started in the last 4 quarters and Apple sold 47.6m iPads in that period, run-rate share might be closer to 40%.

But, but, but…

I’ve hardly seen ANY. Even at MWC in Barcelona, I saw perhaps 3 Android tablets being used by delegates as against several dozen iPads. The Galaxy Touch Note has sold well, but that’s part of the 5-7 inch category and certainly hasn’t sold double digit millions.

At this point, it’s worth looking at the share of different versions of Android. While ‘7 inch plus’ has 5.8% share, Honeycomb (the version of Android designed for tablets that is now being superseded by ICS) only has 3.2% share. There are hardly any ICS tablets out there. So the implication is that almost half of the ‘iPad-sized’ tablets out there are models that are running Android 2.3 and, by implication, being sold, probably cheap, in China and emerging markets, as this story suggests. These are not really iPad competitors.

So, if we take only the Honeycomb segment, Android tablet sales fall to ~10m (3.2% of 330m) - 8% share of tablet sales to date. Somehow that seems more reasonable than 30%.

However, there is a further consideration here: the representativeness of the ‘devices connecting to Android Market’ that are the basis of the Google platform stats. Not all Android devices do connect to Android Market, though no-one quite knows how many - Google itself knows how many do connect but not how many don’t.

In other words, do Android tablets make up the same proportion of devices sold as they do of devices connecting to the Android Market? It is quite possible that Android tablets are more likely to be bought by technically-minded people and therefore more likely to connect to Android market - OR that since there are no Android tablet apps, Android tablet owners don’t bother with Android Market at all and so are under-represented in Googles’s stats. In this question is the potential to swing the sales figure estimate by double digit percentages with no difficulty at all.

Then, of course, there are the Nooks and Kindle Fires, which can run Android apps but which don’t show up in Google’s activation figures at all and (unless an enterprising hacker has side-loaded it) don’t have Android Market either. Sales of these are in the millions, but aren’t publicly disclosed.

As Groucho Marx almost said - these are my estimates, and if you don’t like them I’ve got others.

'Pretty' versus 'design'

Tue, 01 May 2012 13:07:00 +0100

Google has recently got religious about ‘design’ - or what it thinks is design. All the sites have been made-over. Subtle greys and anti-aliasing are everywhere. All of Google looks easier on the eye.

For example, ‘Google Play’, the new umbrella content store that combines apps, movies, music and books, has a ‘pretty’ logo with a careful font selection:

That logo is most often seen on third-party websites (and indeed posters and print ads) for that content providers to promote their content as being available on Google Play, so Google (and Apple) need to create a ‘button’ graphic for those third parties to use.

So how have Google and Apple addressed this requirement?

Apple’s graphic is clear, readable and works well at many sizes. Google’s graphic is almost unreadable.

Clearly, Google has learnt that ‘design’ matters, but hasn’t learnt that there’s a difference between making things look pretty and good design.

March 2012 global smartphone market share. Apple on 25%, Android...

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 00:01:49 +0100

March 2012 global smartphone market share. Apple on 25%, Android on (say) 59%. But, it is not quite that simple - not with the iPhone having around 50% of the US market…

On book design.

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 10:56:00 +0100

On book design.

"Telecommunications is no longer an area of great innovations. So I don’t see the need for..."

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 22:24:00 +0100

“Telecommunications is no longer an area of great innovations. So I don’t see the need for experiments ahead of 1998 [the date of fixed line deregulation in Europe]”

- Charles Rozmaryn, MD, France Telecom, said sometime during 1995.

Google search trends for Tumblr, Twitter and ‘blog’

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 11:54:50 +0100

Google search trends for Tumblr, Twitter and ‘blog’