Great data from Baidu on the state of the Chinese mobile internet - click through for the PDF.
Chinese Android share
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…
iPhone share of smartphone sales in the USA
(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)
iPhone market share in the USA: 50% of Q1 sales
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.
Estimating Android tablet market share: 30%, 40%, 10%?
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.
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 multiplication gets to 230m or so activated devices today - not a very good number (at all!) but better than nothing.
Now, activated devices isn’t the same as devices active today (which is the number to apply the ISC % to) because some old ones will have been deactivated. But in reality Android has only really been on sale since early 2010 so very few devices are more than 2 years old, and we can ignore this today. In the course of 2012 I’ll have to start making an estimate of that.
So, 0.6% multiplied by 230m = 1.3m or so. At this scale, it matters that Google is only giving the percentage to one decimal place - if it was actually 0.64%, for example, it would be closer to 1.5m. So, I’d say 1-1.5m.
We have no way of knowing how this breaks down between upgraded and new devices (though Google presumably has that data).
Next post: tablet stats.
Android, Nokia and iPhone in the UK, as seen in Google Trends. Local charts are more informative for this sort of thing. The long, slow, steady collapse of Nokia is very clear, as is the distance that Android remains behind Apple. It’s also pretty easy to spot new Apple product releases on these charts - and clear that Nokia’s relaunch has not had a comparable impact on public consciousness, at least not yet.
I am slightly suspicious of the drop in Nokia search volume at the beginning of 2011, though - looks like an artefact in the Google system rather than a real-world change.
Source: google.com
Android malware
Android malware is becoming a serious problem. This little gem can install automatically if you tap on a banner add, and then uploads your address book and IMEI. But Open Is Better, right kids? (via PC World).
Depressing that Google is running outdoor poster campaigns against PC malware while enabling this sort of thing on mobile, where it can do far more damage.
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