Mobiles @ NCSU

More phones than you can shake a phone at.

Andrew Cunningham

It's been just under a year since the last time we examined the state of the smartphone. The intervening months have brought us the expected annual hardware refreshes and software updates, but it's striking just how similar things are at a high level.

Apple and Samsung are still standing at the top of the field, and at the moment there's not a strong third-place contender in sales or in reach. HTC continues to be down on its luck despite the critical darling that is the HTC One. LG is still taking pages from Samsung's playbook, trying lots of odd ideas in an effort to differentiate. Microsoft is still struggling to improve Windows Phone 8's standing with consumers, developers, and hardware partners. All of this is more or less as it was a year ago.

That doesn't mean there aren't interesting things happening at the margins. The Motorola division is still a big money-loser for Google, but the Moto X is a surprisingly good, usable phone that has been very well-reviewed. Alternative operating systems like Ubuntu and Firefox OS are trying new things, even if they're strictly for hardcore early adopters as they currently stand. BlackBerry (née RIM), which at this time last year was pinning all its hopes on the then-forthcoming BlackBerry 10, is circling the drain. Microsoft bought the part of Nokia that makes its Lumia smartphones. Few of these events drastically alter the state of the smartphone today, but they all have interesting implications for 2014 and beyond.

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We know BlackBerry is a withering mobile brand, but how fast is it crumbling, and who is gaining from its demise? IDC's latest quarterly numbers yield some answers, showing that Android continues to solidify its dominant lead in the smartphone market, crossing the 80 percent threshold to hit a solid 81 percent of all smartphone shipments in the third quarter of 2013, according to the market research firm. Perhaps more impressively, Windows Phone posted a huge jump, increasing smartphone shipments by 156 percent from last year to capture 3.6 percent of all smartphones shipped in the quarter, which IDC rightly calls "amazing."

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According to new figures from comScore, 40.6 percent of US smartphone subscribers are using iPhones. In the three month period that concluded September 30th, Apple's share grew by 0.7 percent from where it stood in June. The company launched two new iPhone models on September 20th, and the ensuing ten days of sales likely helped boost Apple's position some. Still, the jump wasn't enough to put a dent in Android's commanding lead: Google's OS is running on 51.8 percent of smartphones used by consumers in the US. That's actually a slight (0.2 percent) dip compared with Android's standing in the prior three-month period, when it enjoyed an even 52 percent share.

BlackBerry's customer base continues to dwindle; only 3.8 of US smartphone...

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Aurich Lawson

Six years ago, in November 2007, the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) was announced. The original iPhone came out just a few months earlier, capturing people's imaginations and ushering in the modern smartphone era. While Google was an app partner for the original iPhone, it could see what a future of unchecked iPhone competition would be like. Vic Gundotra, recalling Andy Rubin's initial pitch for Android, stated:

He argued that if Google did not act, we faced a Draconian future, a future where one man, one company, one device, one carrier would be our only choice.

Google was terrified that Apple would end up ruling the mobile space. So, to help in the fight against the iPhone at a time when Google had no mobile foothold whatsoever, Android was launched as an open source project.

In that era, Google had nothing, so any adoption—any shred of market share—was welcome. Google decided to give Android away for free and use it as a trojan horse for Google services. The thinking went that if Google Search was one day locked out of the iPhone, people would stop using Google Search on the desktop. Android was the "moat" around the Google Search "castle"—it would exist to protect Google's online properties in the mobile world.

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Android is the third platform to reach a billion users^[1] . The first was Windows and the second was Facebook. Apple sold around 650 to 700 million iOS and is expected to be the fourth to a billion sometime next year.^[2]

If we define the Race To a Billion to be bounded by a time limit of 10 years, then Windows does not qualify and Android is actually second. The race is shown in the following graphs (the one on the left is logarithmic scaled, the one to the right includes only a few contenders for illustrative reasons).

Android’s activations as reported are shown in the following graph:

Without qualification, Android has been a viral success story. It reached one billion activations in about five years, almost half the time it took FaceBook and far faster than Windows.

However, Android growth can be qualified. I added another set of data which is the number of US Android phone users as deduced from measurements by ComScore.^[3]

One way to read the two graphs is: Between March and August, of the 250 million Android devices activated, 4 million were to new Android consumers in the US. In other words, In the last six months, 1.6% of Android activations went toward new usage in the US. The equivalent figure for iOS is about 6%. Note that these are new users, not included are upgrades. It’s likely that more of the US buying goes toward upgrades because iOS has been in use longer.

So whereas Android is growing very rapidly, there is a question of reliability of that audience. Engagement is one thing, but in the market which shows highest penetration (and deepest distribution of an alternative) Android is peaking.

 Notes:

1. Although activations are not users, I’m assuming that usage is not far behind and the cumulative sales figures I gather are roughly comparable.
2. Separately, iTunes reports 575 million account holders.
3. ComScore surveys users on their primary phone. Survey includes only those aged over 13 years and excludes phones issued by businesses.