(Image courtesy of Computerworld)
If Apple needs yet another reason to go after hardware maker HTC — and in a roundabout way, Google’s Android — they might want to look at some current market share numbers.
Computerworld is reporting on some new figures from web analytics firm Quantcast, which shows that Google’s Android is experiencing some “pretty spectacular” growth over the past few quarters, largely due to the open-source operating system being used on hardware from a number of different manufacturers, versus Apple’s iPhone OS being strictly on the iPhone and iPod touch.
There’s no doubt that the iPhone is still the clear market leader in terms of web consumption, with more than four times the market share than Android. But that wide lead is starting to erode, little by little.
Computerworld notes that in the last month alone, the iPhone lost 3.2 percent of its market share, while competitors Research in Motion and Android both “gained considerably.” Google’s phone market share has grown a whopping 44 percent over the past quarter and almost doubled over the past year, while the iPhone has lost somewhere in the neighborhood of five to 10 percent over the same periods.
The question now is, how will Apple react to the change in market share with this year’s model of iPhone, expected to debut in June? Inquiring minds want to know…
Image courtesy of Ars Technica
It may come as little surprise to iPhone and iPod touch users, but new data from market research firm Gartner proposes that Apple’s App Store walked away with almost all of the mobile app sales last year.
Ars Technica is reporting on the new Gartner numbers, which show that Apple almost completely dominates the mobile app market, “grabbing almost every one of the 4.2 billion dollars spent on mobile apps in 2009.” Things continue to look good for this year as well — despite the continued competition from Android and WebOS devices, Apple and the App Store are expected to maintain two-thirds of the market, if current market trends continue.
The App Store launched alongside iPhone OS 2.0 and the iPhone 3G in July, 2008 and quickly hit 300 million apps sold by that December. Apple reported earlier this month that number had already jumped to 3 billion, which equates to something like 2.5 billion apps sold in 2009 alone.
Gartner estimates that another 16 million apps have been sold from all other mobile platforms combined, which is how they arrived at the 99.4 percent estimate.
“As smartphones grow in popularity and application stores become the focus for several players in the value chain, more consumers will experiment with application downloads,” explains Stephanie Baghdassarian, research director at Gartner. “Games remain the number one application, and mobile shopping, social networking, utilities and productivity tools continue to grow and attract increasing amounts of money.”
According to the Gartner chart above, the company is predicting a virtual explosion of the mobile app market between now and 2013, with 21.6 billion apps sold and a whopping $29.5 billion in revenue. Of those, the firm predicts that 25 percent of that revenue will be advertising-generated.
“Growth in smartphone sales will not necessarily mean that consumers will spend more money, but it will widen the addressable market for an offering that will be advertising-funded,” Baghdassarian concludes. Considering Apple’s recent acquisition of mobile advertising firm Quattro Wireless, their future continues to look bright indeed.
