Android has a better market share than iOS
It’s easy to follow percentage figures – they’re so nice and clean. For example, figures from market intelligence firm IDC say that the iPad’s share of the tablet market is down from 38.2% in Q3 2012 to 33.8% in Q3 2013. What a clear statement. It’s definitely bad for Apple, right?
Indeed, Business Insider’s Steve Kovach wrote in his article ‘Apple Is About To Blow It In Tablets Too’ (having already ‘blown it’ in smartphones, of course) that “Samsung is poised to crush Apple in tablets using the same strategy it did to win in smartphones.” The strategy in question is “to essentially flood the market with as many different types of tablet as it can”, and Kovach believes that the IDC figures show that it’s working.
But here’s the thing about those IDC iPad percentages: they mean almost nothing. All the companies involved have started making more tablets and sending those to stores, and that’s what those figures are based on (not already sold tablets – so they don’t represent the total tablet ownership). Also, they don’t even tell you how many of those tablets were actually sold to customers, rather than just languishing on shop shelves. But when of all the other companies combined manufacture more tablets than Apple does, it makes Apple’s figures go down, regardless of how well Apple is doing, or how badly the others might be selling. Indeed, it’s thought most non-Apple tablets are sold in the very, very cheap category (think £200 or less) as, basically, portable video players, rather than lightweight computers like the iPad.
Let’s consider, for a moment, another figure for market share: online usage. Web analytics firm StatCounter announced that 74.5% of worldwide online tablet use that it tracked was from iPads. So the figures for actual use are rather different to those of what may or not have been sold in one quarter, funnily enough.
It’s the same story with the understanding that Apple has “blown it” with phones – Samsung has indeed sold more phones recently, but sales of iPhones are still growing, just like iPads. Let’s look at some usage stats again, this time from marketing company Smart Insights. It says that 59.6% of smartphone web traffic comes from iPhones, with 39% from Android. A different story, and neither it nor the iPad figures above take apps into account, where mobile and tablet users spend a huge amount of their usage time, and Apple is widely out in front on. Really, neither the
usage stats nor the sales figures tell the whole story – between phones being passed on as handme-downs, cheap phones and tablets being sold but barely used and general confusion in the numbers, the conclusions you can draw are limited. Which is absolutely fine – it just means that you can’t really suggest that Apple is struggling from them.