While people will want to dismiss this because it's based in several devices, prior to the release of the new iPhone, and because it's still restricted to AT&T - all valid facts - the important thing to notice here is trend. Android devices have been gaining market pretty solidly lately; first the AdMob ad pushing statistics, now unit sales... this seems to be one from many more that will come.
Apple has no reason to be afraid, I'm pretty sure, as they are probably happy in having just a slice of the market and still being super lucrative (same position they play in the desktop business). But for app developers, this is a pretty strong hit of future market changes.
Not necessary. Their strategy seems to be going for the mass market with their iPhone-OS-based products rather than a niche with OS X-based products. Look at their:
1. Pricing for iPhone (after the initial launch), iPod touch and iPad launch price. They aren't the most expensive "smartphones" and tablets.
2. App store app prices, especially for iPhones/iPod touch. They don't control the prices, but they provide a list to choose from and they indirectly influence pricing. See (3).
3. App store top X, what's hot, etc charts. Apps are sold exactly like mp3s.
Can you name a major market where the majority of users own the same exact product? People like different cars, different appliances, different houses, etc. How do you expect the phones to be different?
I'd argue that phones are becoming a lot less like computers and more like cars. At least the iPhone as an example, phones are becoming more and more an information appliance, taken for granted to "just work."
They might be able to do a lot of the things that a "real" computer does but you don't have the power to treat them like regular computers. You can't easily put a new OS on them, write software for them without going through a central market place, etc. Apple obviously has this vision, but it's becoming clear that Microsoft shares it, at least for Windows Phone 7.
What excatly is "same" between the teeny shuffle and an iPod touch? This only underscores my point that you need a fair amount of diversity in your products o dominated a market.
Looking only at the price they charge consumers doesn't give an accurate picture of their pricing strategy. Most estimates I've seen peg the average total revenue Apple makes per iPhone hardware sale at about $600, most of this paid to Apple by AT&T. Once that's taken into account, the iPhone probably has one of the highest revenues per unit on the market.
So their strategy is really to make a product that everyone wants, and to use that popularity to get phone companies to sell a high-margin niche product at mass market prices.
Apple has never played the numbers game. To do so would be like BMW, Jaguar or Lexis selling a car for the same price as a Kia Rio. Sure they'd sell tonnes of them, but what is the point in that?
They make their money by making good, high quality and reasonably expensive products. If their stock price keeps going the same way then they shouldn't even consider changing the recipe!
I think Android outselling the iPhone (and eventually overtaking it in raw numbers) will soon become pretty obvious. Android is a pretty mass-market product - its flexibility means that manufacturers can put a wide array of products and users can make those products their own.
I really don't think a single product (especially a tightly-defined one like the iPhone) can meet even a majority of people's needs.
And I think this is why Adobe's anti-trust activity against Apple won't go very far.
Apple is very comfortable taking part of the market, owning it, doing things their way, and making boatloads of money. They are not trying to be everything to everyone.
Disclosure: I just switched from iPhone to a Google N1 because I was tired of the box Apple put me in.
@symesc: I just switched from an iPhone to a N1 for the same reason. An inferior phone for a dozen reasons- but a switch I plan to stick with, for now.
My hopes and expectations for Android on the N1 were about here (holds hand 12 inches off of desk).
After two days with it I honestly had a headache. It just didn't work the way I thought it would, after having spent the better part of 3 years on iPod Touch and iPhone. Maybe the headache was my brain creating new neural pathways? Regardless, my opinion was here (hand 6 inches off of desk).
This was my trough of disillusionment. I even cheated. I turned on my now-SIM-less iPhone and checked my twitter feed. I felt dirty. Used.
Then something clicked. First I was finding things I could do with Android that I couldn't do with iPhone. Things like downloading 20mb+ podcasts without connecting to my Mac. Things like finding apps like AppBrain that create meaningful recommendations for me. Things like putting widgets on the screen instead of just icons. And the ease of multitasking? Sigh. My impression of this platform is now here (hand 24 inches above desk).
This is not to say there aren't issues. My battery life is terrible and I'm actively experimenting with ways to change this. Overall the Android platform is "scruffier" than iPhone, and by that I mean moving from one app to the next can be jarring from a usability perspective.
But that's part of what I like about Android. If the iPhone is like the suburbs, rows and rows of consistent housing and 2.2 children, Android is like living downtown where the action is. Sure it's dangerous. And now I wouldn't want to have my wife and kids down there after hours. They have iPhones and iPods. Safer that way.
But I'm not going back the burbs. In fact, I gave my iPhone away to a buddy who had his stolen. I don't miss it.
If Apple delivers something equally as compelling to my inner geek, great, I'll get one. Until then, I have never been happier with my phone.
I'd only used an iPhone for 6 months, but the experience was positive enough that I'm still in the headache phase with the N1. Largely over hardware problems that will likely never be solved until a later revision: battery life, AMOLED screen being unreadable in direct sunlight, the camera can take 1-4 seconds before snapping a photo, dust under the screen, low-end multitouch sensor, and flaky touch sensing (often thinks I'm pressing an inch down). I feel sort of ripped off when I think of some of those aspects.
Don't get me wrong, there things I prefer, even over a jailbroken iPhone- especially the notifications system. That's genius, IMHO.
My trough is the Facebook app- I went from making a few photo posts a day, mostly of my kid, to one or two over the last two weeks. Never bothered to update Feacebook until I got an iPhone- it's rough enough on Android that I've stopped.
N1 software still isn't quite as good as iPhone. But here are 4 reasons I prefer my N1:
1. the navigation app is better than what you can get on iPhone (use it almost every day)
2. Native Google Voice App
3. 5 megapixel camera phone (for me this was the threshold where I never carry a separate digital camera anymore, 5MP is enough for facebook)
4. I can use t-mobile instead of AT&T
Given the software isn't quite as good, these 4 features make it about a tie with the iPhone in my opinion. The fact Apple is irritating me lately makes the N1 a win.
I'm a proud father of a two year old the long lag of the N1's camera makes it near worthless. Doesn't matter if it's 5 or 10MP as long as it takes over a second to snap a photo.
I was impressed by the iPhone's camera, but that's only because I was coming from an HTC Mogul, which had a horrible 2MP camera.
That I can (mostly) do what I want with my N1 without relying on a jailbreak is what makes the N1 a win, overwhelmingly. That said, it is ironic and frustrating that your warranty is voided when you unlock your bootloader, a part of rooting a N1. It doesn't matter if there is dust under the screen, they see the "unlocked" icon and turn down warranty requests.
At least, they were- I'd love to hear that things have changed... Unless that changes I won't be rooting my N1, and I'm glad I didn't do that first thing- I just had to send my two week old N1 in for a swap to HTC because of dust under the screen. :/
The lag your experience with the camera is mostly likely do to the autofocus/exposure whatever stuff. When I first got my N1, I would "click" the onscreen shutter "button" quickly like it was a hyperlink or something. Instead, you need to hold the onscreen shutter "button" down until you hear a tone and get a yellowish outline around the picture preview area. Then let go of the "button" and the picture will take instantly.
I heard the same thing from several other people about the N1. I ended up buying it anyway - I really needed a smartphone, and I'd never been quite willing to go for the iPhone, mainly because of what my friends told me about their monthly bills (I like to prepay on a fixed-rate plan and not have to think about it).
So I was pleasantly surprised to find how easy everything was, apparently because it was all new for me. battery life was the only thing that upset me at first, but after juggling setting a bit I'm happy with that. Haven't had a problem with the other things, other than the flaky touch sensing - I'm pretty sure this is a software problem, because when I run into it (once ever 2-3 days) I've gotten into the habit of sleeping and waking the phone with the top button, which seems to fix it.
The poster above is right about it being a little 'scruffy' in terms of not having a completely smooth user experience...but like him, I'm OK with that because I like having a pocket computer rather than an appliance. It reminds me of the home computer v. game console debate in the 80s, actually, with Android as in the role of MSX.
I can't speak on behalf of the grandparent poster but my gripes are not at all with the N1 hardware itself -- in fact the N1 is quite possibly the best put together phone I've owned. My issues are with Android and how it still feels rough around the edges.
1) Lack of an integrated mail tool. I really don't care so much about POP/IMAP folder integration but why do I need two email apps, one for Gmail and one for IMAP. The stock IMAP client sucks for that matter and I've had a lot better luck with Jesse Vincent's K9Mail fork off the core mail app.
2) The pull down notification bar seems clunky. On one hand it's nice to see at a glance all the things that happened on my phone while I wasn't using it. However when "you have unread mail" or "missed call" is mixed in with "XYZ song is playing" it gets sort of muddled.
3) Deleting an app is quite possibly the most unintuitive thing on the whole phone. If you're used to just hitting an "X" on the home screen from the iPhone you're in for a disappointment.
None of these are dealbreakers for me and in general I am still very satisfied with my N1. However it seems to me that Android is still very much a platform for hackers. For example, Android has a running process list with an option to kill tasks on the phone. Not so on the iPhone, because the OS developers clearly decided their users shouldn't even have to think about this.
My N1 arrives tomorrow so I have no first-hand experience, but I assume you can access gmail through IMAP on the phone like you can on any other mail client if you don't want to use the Gmail app?
>For example, Android has a running process list with an option to kill tasks on the phone.
Android does not have this. There are third party applications that do task management, however the word "placebo" applies to most advocates of them, and user task management should never be necessary. If the system needs resources it dehydrates tasks and terminates them, and this is a cardinal foundation of the platform.
The new iPhone multitasking system works in a very similar manner to how Android has always worked, it should be mentioned.
>Lack of an integrated mail tool. I really don't care so much about POP/IMAP folder integration but why do I need two email apps, one for Gmail and one for IMAP.
Because the gmail app has different features and functions?
> Deleting an app is quite possibly the most unintuitive thing on the whole phone.
Now this is just weird. The most obviously way to uninstall an app is to simply go into downloads (where you installed it) and pick uninstall. The second to go into applications in settings and uninstall.
Your gripes are seemingly that you've been mentally debilitated by using the iPhone, and now you use everything relative to how the iPhone works.
If I go to "Applications > Settings > Running Services" on a stock 2.1 Android phone I get a list of running tasks with their corresponding package names. Tapping one of them terminates the task. It's not "top" but it's still pretty close to a process manager.
A user shouldn't have to care that "com.google.process.gapps" is running "MailSyncAdapterService."
>Because the gmail app has different features and functions?
OK, that's fair, so merge them into one app and have it display gmail accounts in an enhanced manner. It simply seems counterintuitive to have two applications for the task of reading email.
>I get a list of running tasks with their corresponding package names
That gives you get a list of running services. Further, in no way is a user ever directed to go there for any reason. You have no reason to ever go into that screen.
The reason I have is killing tasks like Camera, which appear to chew away at the battery even as they sit in the background... It wasn't until I started using a task manager that I started getting decent battery life out of my N1.
The first week, I followed the party line- I didn't touch a task manager. And the first week I was seeing 20% of my battery drained by 10 AM in the morning while using it for under 15 minutes since I pulled it off the charger.
The placebo effect is remarkably powerful, so I know I'm not going to convince you. However let me say that I took my phone off the charger at 8:30am, and right now my battery is at around 95%.
I never manage processes or services. I use apps and leave them and allow Android to manage the lifecycle.
Sure I do. I use it to kill the exchange email sync, because it triples battery usage even when I have it set to not sync (I believe this has something to do with the fact that it's just scraping Outlook Web Access, not actually connecting with Exchange, which is impossible outside of the firewall.)
And I use it for this sort of thing frequently. Most services pull down battery life considerably.
With these services up, my Droid loses maybe 40% of its battery life in a day (with minimal usage.)
While I sleep, it rarely consumes more than 10%. The counterexamples have been when I've left the Pandora Service running, as well as the Email Sync service.
So, I test it by enabling the service, changing nothing else about my usage, and watching my battery life take a nosedive.
And on the subject of what exactly it's doing, that's roughly the explanation I got from my friends on the Windows side. We have Exchange disabled outside the firewall, so my phone has to hit up OWA to get the data. Is Exchange Web Services an API available from OWA, but separate from the HTML? It's my understanding that my phone is in fact scraping the HTML.
There's 4 different interfaces that use the same OWA URL but function completely differently. There's the web based email that people typically think of when someone says "OWA". There's WebDAV, which uses HTTP or form based authentication (to pick up the proper cookies) and then uses special URLs and WebDAV HTTP verbs to perform actions relative to retrieving/sending mail, listings, calendar, etc (this is in the process of being deprecated I believe). There's Web Services, which is (if I remember correctly) a SOAP API that provides the same functionality as WebDAV (and some additional functionality) which has become the preferred method as of Exchange 2007. There's ActiveSync, which uses WBXML formatted message passing (it's more complicated, but more robust than WebDAV and Web Services). If you're using k9mail to talk to an Exchange server, it uses WebDAV. If you're using the "Work Email" app, it will use ActiveSync, Web Services and WebDAV, depending on which is enabled. If you're using TouchDown, it will use whichever of the three you select.
Frequently in configurations, WebDAV access, Web Services access and ActiveSync are all enabled when OWA is enabled for the Exchange server. It is only in rare conditions when you will see OWA enabled and not one of the three.
> If the system needs resources it dehydrates tasks and terminates them
Has the OS been fixed such that it monitors CPU and network radio usage by background processes? Task killing isn't done to reclaim the RAM (which, as you note, the OS handles itself), it's to ensure that poorly-written programs don't waste your battery without your control or knowledge.
iPhoneOS 4.0 gets around this by only allowing apps in the background to use a tightly defined set of APIs, the actual processing code of which is written entirely by Apple, so they have full control over their effect on battery life.
@ergo98: Please elaborate. Even if I concede that my problems with multitasking are imaginary, I'd love to find out how I can enable built-in support for Exchange calendaring, copy from emails, and make the N1's screen readable in bright sunlight... Believe me, I'd love to find out there was just a preference I missed!
(replying here because I can't reply to your comment directly)
The N1 has flaws, but many of your complaints are hilariously wrong. The fact that you give pronouncements on multitasking borders on comical, as you have no understanding about how Android's multitasking works.
Please elaborate. Even if I concede that my problems with multitasking are imaginary, I'd love to find out how I can enable built-in support for Exchange calendaring, copy from emails, and make the N1's screen readable in bright sunlight... Believe me, I'd love to find out there was just a preference I missed!
I understand how Android's multitasking is supposed to work, but in my experience it isn't up to snuff. From your tone, I imagine you'd ask me to put up with a sluggish phone rather than doing something to deal with it. Maybe it'll get better in 2.2.
@ergo98: The 3GS is indeed crippled, but an objective user would be hard pressed to call it inferior. In the end, to each their own- some folks (including myself) are willing to put up with the limitations of the N1, and some folks are willing to put up with the limitations of an unjailbroken iPhone.
>some folks (including myself) are willing to put up with the limitations of the N1
Which limitations would those be?
>but an objective user would be hard pressed to call it inferior
It is absolutely inferior in at least a dozen ways. It is superior in a variety of other ways (polish), however I am simply using the same phrasing that you used relative to the N1.
heh, thanks for the heads up! A habit from other threaded boards, even though the syntax is twitter. Some folks still manage to get confused about who is speaking to whom- but point taken, this isn't slashdot. :)
Android is definitely picking up pace. I just hope Apple releases an iPhone for Verizon. I think that will give the iPhone a boost. Apple should also release an iPhone Nano, a smaller version of the iPhone. Maybe also have colors.
I think if Apple ever does an iPhone Nano it will be more of an extension of the current iPod Nano than a smaller version of the iPhone. It would be difficult to scale the iPhone UI/apps down to a physically smaller screen without usability problems. I imagine they would only go this route if iPod sales really plummeted due to convergence of media players in phones. It might be a compelling device though with an iPhone-ish UI and some simplified widget style applications.
I mean, now, when Apple (a) stopped sticking to the only resolution for all iPhone OS devices and (b) is putting much higher resolution screen into older package - maybe it might make sense for them to also put old resolution (320 x 480) into smaller package?
The problems I see in these approach are the following:
1. How can one meaningfully make iPhone smaller/more energy efficient/cheaper?
2. Do people need a smaller iPhone? Is physically smaller touch screen as usable?
Yeah, good points. I think they can make the screen a bit smaller than the current iPhone, but keep the 320x480 resolution. This way apps will still be usable. But they can also remove space from the top and bottom of the phone and make it a lot thinner. Overall, I think they can really shrink the iPhone significantly. This could appeal to lots of people. Especially, now the iPad is out and people don't mind having a smaller iPhone to compliment their iPad.
1. More networks, more devices. It's like saying that Windows sells more than Macbook Pros.
2. Everyone and their mothers knows that in a month Apple will introduce a new one
3. Soon the big majority of cell phones will be what we usually call smartphones. It would be fool to think that one single device will maintain dominate the marketshare. The point is that if you look at the single device, no-one is even closed to Apple's number.
> The point is that if you look at the single device, no-one is even closed to Apple's number.
Really? Is that what matters? It seems to me the more significant thing would be the OS and not any one device, especially for HN-types that write apps and build sites for OSes/browsers and not a piece of hardware.
The most significant thing is actually what kind of market there is for the apps/sites we are building. Market is not just about the number of users, it's about how much those users are buying. It's the reason that Mac developers can make more than their PC counterparts on many types of applications, because the Mac users buy more software. (at least I know I have since I switched).
My experience over the last few weeks spent using a new Nexus One as a former iPhone certainly supports this. Frankly, I'm stunned at the difference in quality and breadth of applications available in the App Store vs Android Market- compared to the App Store, the Market is like Softpedia or Tucows...
I'd have to agree with slyn- both. I think it's most likely I'd be selling apps for Android in the long term, if only because I don't have to live by 3.3.1...
I wouldn't be surprised if a divide not unlike Mac vs PC software developed- traditionally, Mac users were a smaller group but more willing to pay for overall better software.
I just looked at the Android SDK for the first time the other day, and it seemed to indicate that you must write your apps in Java? That seems even more restrictive than 3.3.1 to me. Or did I miss something?
The problem is that doing great applications that sells well it's harder when you need to make them looks polished like iphone ones with such a big variety of devices. Soon your fridge will use Android, that doesn't mean I'd like to develop apps for it.
Also iPhone users have been "trained" for years with iTunes to buy digital content.
"Soon the big majority of cell phones will be what we usually call smartphones."
My guess here is, that this will be a major winning point for Android, as i think that the next-gen low cost smartphones (presumably the ones that will most likely be bought by current featurephone owners) will be Android ones. Vodafone in germany will sell an Android phone for 130€ (prepaid, 1€ with contract) soon, for example.
Even more so, this may be a huge advantage in the emerging markets like china and india.
Indeed. Fragmentation is probably the biggest reason we'll never see Android Market-sales on a per-device basis top what each iPhone user spends in the App Store- there's a wife range of CPU power, RAM, graphics capability, peripherals, multitouch or not, etc on Android devices. Like being back in the world of Windows CE...
The same is happening to the iPhone ecosystem; at a slower pace, but it's happening. Before it was the iPhone 2G; now it's iPhone 2G, 3G, 3GS, iPad, soon the new iPhone 4G... soon there will be way too many differences in resolution, screen size, CPU and OS too.
Sales per-device is irrelevant, IMO. If I sell 100 for 10 devices, it's better than selling 90 for 3 devices. It's not like I have to add one IF() condition for each new model in my code; merely that I have to plan for slower CPUs and different screen sizes and resolutions, and when I do so, it's for a whole group of similar devices.
It's a bit different though -- if you look at stats on Flurry for some of the popular apps, you'll see that there is less than 3% iPhone OS 2.0 users out there. That's simply because iPhone users get a free OS upgrade when they hook up to iTunes. The majority of users who are still stuck in the 2.0 land are iPod Touch users since they actually have to pay for the 3.0 upgrade. That's why the iPhone market has significantly less fragmentation.
However, I have a HTC MyTouch android phone that is still stuck in 1.6 land. I upgraded from 1.5 recently, but it was not the simplest process to do so. HTC doesn't really make it easy for phone owners to upgrade their phone OS. It's possible for me to use the CyanogenMod to upgrade my OS to 2.0, but not without lots of effort at the command line.
The current slew of 1.5/1.6 android devices out there right now will probably never be upgraded to 2.x mostly because the phone manufacturers rarely make it an easy process.
People don't seem to notice that on the iPhone platform fragmentation is limited because people keep buying new devices.
Usage stats from my app in April (somewhat unscientific but illustrates my point decently):
iPhone 3G: 49 users
iPhone 3GS: 48 users
iPod Touch 2nd Gen 4 users
iPod Touch 1st Gen 3 users
iPhone Edge 2 users
iPod touch 1 user
iPad 1 user (might have been me...)
Well, the 2G is being phased out with the next OS release, meaning that even though people will still use their old one development will still be focused on a few core devices. The first major fragmentation will be with the new hi-res screen on the next iPhone, the 3G and 3GS aren't really that different to develop for.
I think you would care about making money more than the size of the platform. There was a time when MySpace had 2x more users than Facebook, but app developers on MySpace didn't have the same level of virility that Facebook apps had and thus it was far more lucrative to make FB apps.
I agree. Which is why those numbers aren't that interesting when comparing Android to iPhone OS, since iPod touches and iPads are a part of the platform.
That being said, it clearly says that the Android platform is growing.
It's not about the size of the market as much as the quality.
Would you rather have 100,000 potential users and make 1,000 sales or 200,000 users and make 800. Or maybe make the same amount of sale but being able to charge more because you know that who spend $500 for a phone is more incline to spend $10 on an app than somebody who spent $100?
If the iPhone user buys 3 apps for every 1 the Android user does, but in a couple years there are 10 times as many Android users, where do you sell your app?
The attach rate and the market size make all the difference, and there is no data to support the conclusion you are trying to make.
A gaming PC is a hell of a lot more expensive than a console, yet their attach rate is way way lower than a console.
Is this like "the seven stages of grief" or something?
Yeah, there is big news here, denial-be-damned.
A few short months ago we were all told that there was just so much confusion in Android-land. So many choices and so many versions it was a major turn off for consumers. Instead the one-sized-fits-all iPhone model was the winner (and it was). Now it's "duh...of course Android moves ahead" as if that's the new reality.
>Everyone and their mothers knows that in a month Apple will introduce a new one
The Nexus 2 will be out in a very short while. The Samsung Galaxy S will be out with 3x the GPU power. The Evo 4G of course. And on, and on, and on.
>The point is that if you look at the single device, no-one is even closed to Apple's number.
It was never about a single device. It has never been a single device.
Android is the Windows of smartphone operating systems. iPhone OS is the OS X of smartphone operating systems.
Guess which will have the majority of sales and smaller profit-per-phone and which will have minority of sales and higher profit-per-phone, eventually.
Another thing to worry about is manufacturers abandoning support for old phones prematurely, or causing long delays between updates to new major versions. (I'm not sure if Android phones can update over the air, but if not then you may have a large number of users who never upgrade their OS.)
Yes, technical users can probably acquire third-party firmware if the manufacturers drop the ball, but that's not a mainstream fix.
Android will not be fun to develop for if you're targeting (hardware spec fragmentation) x (Android feature fragmentation) different combinations of phone.
Google's interest in how the mobile market develops is at least as strong as Apple.
Google provided the business muscle involved in getting a phone sold by a major carrier (who provide the massive subsidies that make these phones mainstream) and Google's massive popularity among regular internet users helped drive interest.
Google's involvement is the key factor in Android's adoption.
There were a lot of iPod Touch devices (and now iPads) sold too though, so the mobile application market is still heavily dominated by Apple devices. Good to see competition in the smartphone space though.
Now that Android has somewhat matured and HP is dumping massive resources into WebOS, it may be time for Apple to think about winning hearts and minds again, doing things like allowing iPhone users to install the apps they want to install, including those which carriers and other partners may not be particularly fond of, as Android and WebOS users are able to do.
Of course the yearly iPhone release cycle is a big factor, and it can be expected that the product will do relatively poorly at the end of its cycle, but that's also what makes the iPhone so incredibly profitable for Apple. A possible solution to this may be for Apple to have two radically different iPhone models serving different markets, and have the release cycles staggered by six months. Another alternative would be to release a new model every eight months instead of twelve, take a hit in profitability, and still be able to line up with people's two-year plan refreshes, now every three phone models instead of two. Overall, this problem is somewhat mitigated by the attraction of iPhone OS app availability and the iPhone's brand strength, so it may not be the most important issue to address.
The other obvious factor is the exclusive carrier agreement with AT&T in the US, with Verizon pouring marketing money into Android to counter Apple's iPhone. Apple is leaving the door wide open for competitors to establish themselves with people who prefer other carriers for various reasons, giving a great boost to Android device vendors. Ending this exclusive distribution agreement as soon as possible seems like the most obvious answer to this competitive pressure.
Personally, I recommend people get Android phones because I'm fearful of the power Apple wields over its users (namely me, making me jailbreak my iPhone to run valuable applications that Apple won't allow for whatever reason), and I need credible competition to keep that power in check. I think many technophiles are rooting for and promoting competitors, even if they use iPhones themselves, simply due to Apple's repression of user empowerment with iPhone OS devices. I honestly believe that loosening the reins on their iPhone OS users would afford Apple a whole lot more goodwill with geeks, and remove many of the reservations they have recommending iPhones to people. Making the iPhone more geek-friendly should obviously not be done at the expense of usability for the less geeky, but the value of courting this class of users is to be ignored at Apple's peril, as they are the ones many people trust to guide their purchasing decisions.
So that seems about the extent of what Apple can do to turn their fortunes around. It will be interesting to see how this marketshare trend holds in the next year in relation to the iPhone release cycle, ruling out the effect of the end of the current iPhone model's life, compounded by the Gizmodo iPhone 4G leak. There are other obvious areas of improvement in the iPhone OS I'm sure they're working on, such as a workable documents and basic filesystem functionality, but the PR problem surrounding the issue of vendor control over users seems like the critical one for the iPhone at this point. That said, I don't want to take away from this momentous day for Android users, developers and stakeholders.
This is a huge milestone for the Android platform, and a watershed moment for mobile app developers. You can bet this is music to the ears of Android devs looking for investment, and that Android will be getting a lot better software for it. It's good to see Apple get a taste of humble pie; they've always done their best work as underdogs, when the pressure is on. Personally, if Apple stays their current course another year, I would expect this trend to be irreversible.
Disclosure: I own some AAPL and PALM shares. Sorry for the essay!
Apple has no reason to be afraid, I'm pretty sure, as they are probably happy in having just a slice of the market and still being super lucrative (same position they play in the desktop business). But for app developers, this is a pretty strong hit of future market changes.