Android stays ahead of iPhone surge in US (despite what Nielsen thinks)

Though the iPhone did incredibly well in the past three months in the US – getting nearly half of sales – Nielsen's claim that it's 'catching up' with Android isn't quite right. Other platforms, meanwhile, have trouble

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Nielsen's claim that the iPhone is 'catching up' with Android isn't quite right. Photograph: Suzanne Plunkett/Reuters

"More US Consumers Choosing Smartphones as Apple Closes the Gap on Android" says the headline on the Nielsen blog, looking at sales of smartphone in the US over the fourth quarter.

Only one thing wrong about it: Apple isn't, by the numbers Nielsen provides, closing the gap in installed base on Android. Instead, the Android OS is extending its lead in smartphones – which, according to Nielsen, stands at 46.3% of the total market; Apple, it says, has 30% of the overall market.

US installed base (left) and market share in the past three months (right) of smartphone platforms. Source: Nielsen

The error arises in Nielsen's interpretation of its data, where it says that among recent acquirers of smartphones (that is, in the past three months), "44.5% of those surveyed in December said they chose aniPhone, compared to just 25.1% in October. Furthermore, 57% of new iPhone owners surveyed in December said they got an iPhone 4S."

Okay, fair enough. But its figures for acquirers of smartphones in the past three months shows that 37% of them got iPhones, and 51.7% of them got Android phones. (We'll come to the other platforms in a moment.)

That means, roughly, that for every 10 smartphones sold in those three months, four were iPhones and five were running Android. (Nielsen gives figures: 61.6% v 25.1% for Android/iOS in October, 48.7% v 38.8% in November, 46.9% v 44.5% in December.) At no point have iPhones been outselling the totality of Android phones – though in December they came within 2.4%, so nearly neck and neck.

US market shares over last three months of 2011 for Android, iOS and RIM. Source: Nielsen

The point being that you can't catch up with someone if you're running at nine-tenths the speed they are. The iPhone hasn't "closed the gap", except in the sense that nearly as many people were buying iPhones in December as they were Android phones.

However, until and unless iPhone sales overtake Android sales, the lead that Android – as a platform – enjoys in the US smartphone market is going to continue to grow.

We'll have to see what happens to the figures in January: it's faintly possible that Apple could overhaul all Android phones in sales, but I wouldn't bet the house on it.

The one wrinkle in all this of course is that Apple is just one company, where "Android" describes lots of companies - Samsung, HTC, and Motorola for example. Even with Samsung's growing power in the US (though HTC used to dominate Android sales there) it's unlikely to have taken a near-100% share of the Android market there. So Apple might have sold more smartphones than any other company in the US over those three months.

But as Stephen Elop of Nokia says, it's a war of ecosystems, not a battle of devices. Apple's chosen its ecosystem. And Android is the principal one it's up against right now.

And the first part of those wars may be over: Nielsen says that 46% of US mobile consumers now have a smartphone. (In the UK, the figure passed 50% around autumn 2011.) It seems a safe assumption that there will be a certain segment who will hold out against smartphones – which means there's probably less than 50% of the market to play for in the coming years.

Other platforms

• RIM's BlackBerry is having an appalling time in the US. The Nielsen data suggests that its existing installed base is 14.9% – but its share of the past three months' sales was 6%. Even worse, that fell continuously over the three months, from 7.7% to 6.4% to 4.5%. What makes this part of the story even worse is that this is with its new devices – the ones which came out (a little late) in the autumn, offering touch screens and all sorts of bells and whistles (though not Flash. Is that the problem? Nah, thought not.) The resignation last night of the two chief executives (who also resigned their co-chairmen roles) is indicative that they've finally realised they have A Problem.

For RIM, there doesn't seem to be a bottom to the market; there's a suspicion that its corporate customers are abandoning it (or not renewing contracts, which comes to the same thing). It is going to have to rely on the enthusiastic markets outside the US (which include the UK) to keep itself going while it hopes – it has to hope – that its new products based on QNX, due sometime late (in both senses) this year will revive its fortunes. So far, that hasn't happened, at least in its former biggest market.

• Windows Phone. Still not very visible, but expanding: Nielsen says it has 1.3% of installed based, and had 1.4% of sales in the past three months. In other words, growing. But this of course is all before Nokia's renewed assault on the market with the Lumia 710 on T-Mobile, and the Lumia 900 with LTE (and a 23% bigger battery) starting sales this year. Meanwhile Symbian, with 1.4% of the installed base, got 0.9% of sales – so it's fading (even more).

• Windows Mobile and Palm/WebOS. People are still buying these (2.4% – bigger than Windows Phone! – and 0.5% respectively). Proof that old mobile operating systems don't die until handset makers stop making them.

Source : http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2012/jan/23/android-ahead-iphone-us?newsfeed=true

Q&A: Android Design Chief Details Google’s Mobile Future

Android UX design chief Matias Duarte talks exclusively with Wired on design, competitors and the future of mobile.Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

By most measures, the Android platform is an enormous success. It dominates the smartphone space in terms of market share, with over a quarter of a billion currently activated devices. It’s on phones and tablets made by four of the largest smartphone manufacturers in the world. And its reach isn’t slowing.

But with enormous growth comes problems, many of which Google knows quite well. App stores. Competitors. That dirty word: “fragmentation.” All of this bogs down Android during a critical phase of its development, just a few years since its initial launch.

Android needs a hero — someone who can unify the platform and work on the many weaknesses that critics attack, and even supportive users grumble about. And Matias Duarte, Android’s head of user experience, wants to take that role.

Under Duarte, Android launched Ice Cream Sandwich — aka Android 4.0 — late last year. It’s the team’s strongest effort yet in offering a robust, well-designed operating system that can measure up to the likes of Apple’s and Microsoft’s OS platforms. And at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month, Duarte launched the other half of the plan, the Android Design web site, which aims to make it easier for designers to create better, more user-friendly apps.

I sat down with Duarte at CES for an exclusive pre-launch interview, and picked his brain about Android, design in general, and competing operating systems like Windows Phone and webOS — the platform he architected for Palm years ago.

On Android Design

Wired: So tell me the philosophy behind launching the Android Design developer site. Is it specifically for what users are going to see in the interface, or is this more engineering focused?

Matias Duarte: It’s both what the user sees and how the application functions. Thus far, Android has had a lot of terrific developer API-level documentation. But we haven’t really had a style guide, we haven’t had interaction guidelines.

We haven’t, for example, given you a lot of guidance on how to migrate your application from a phone perhaps to a tablet. We’ve done so only by example, by showing you the way all the apps function in Ice Cream Sandwich. So we want to just kind of open up our studio’s doors, if you will. We want to show you how we think, and how we designed Ice Cream Sandwich to work. What all its principals and its rules and its conventions are so you don’t have to try and discover that yourself.

Wired: Is this a response to feedback you’ve been getting from the Android community?

Duarte: This is something that developers and designers are really hungry for. For any platform, it’s really important to understand what its conventions and patterns are. And so this is our chance — now that we’ve finished running the marathon to get the product out the door — to show them how they too can make apps that look and work as simply and as beautifully as the apps that we’ve made for Ice Cream Sandwich.

Wired: You know what this strikes me as? Like my Bible, the AP Style Guide, only for developers.

Duarte: That’s exactly what it is. There’s a lot of generally agreed-upon good interaction design practices, as well as universal mobile interaction practices. Still, every operating system does things a little differently, has its own conventions. The frameworks are different.

Wired: So does this mean — “rules?” There’s direction, and then there’s mandate.

Duarte: Well, it’s a slightly different situation because we don’t have an editor who’s going to yell at you if you’re out of line. In computer ecosystems, the public decides how successful applications will be after they hit the market. So within our style guide we have certain things that we think are absolutely how one should make an Android app. But there are other variables — examples in which code is good in some cases and bad in others. There it’s left up to you to make a judgment call as to which pattern you should adopt. There, we don’t have a hard and fast rule. But in either case, there’s nothing that we do to enforce that.

The new UI of Ice Cream Sandwich. Photo: Mike Isaac/Wired.com

On Tablets vs. Smartphones

Wired: I’m thinking of tablets versus smartphones specifically, and where Ice Cream Sandwich fits in. Is this going to help bridge that gap? This is something that — in terms of tablets — people have wanted for a long time.

We have some portions of the guide that are specifically focused on that topic. How to design an app that takes advantage of the extra space on the tablet. How to design an app that will adapt and use a different type of user interface when it recognizes on a screen that is appropriately phone-size, and on a screen that’s tablet size.

So what we’ve launched — it’s not a document, it’s not a book, it’s a site. It’s a destination where we continuously add more detail to some of the documentation that we have, and some of it is very nitty-gritty.

To be honest, some of the most valuable content is in our design patterns. It’s our thinking that goes into certain conventions, or paradigms, practices. And in these we’ve started with a set of some of what we think are the most important or new patterns that we’ve introduced in Ice Cream Sandwich.

Wired: Do you expect this to bolster tablet apps in general?

Duarte: I think it should help tablet apps. Honestly, again, it wasn’t a particular goal of ours to focus on tablet apps because we don’t really think of tablet apps internally. But I think there’s no doubt that several sections of the guide do focus on some of the problems unique to larger screens, and so by nature that will help tablet apps.

Source : http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/01/android-design-matias-duarte-2/

Android to Top iOS In Developer Interest In 2012

More app developers are going to go "Android first" over Apple's iOS this year, according to a survey by research firm Ovum. While there is a legitimate chance of this happening, we will believe it when we see it. It often seems like analysts are shooting in the dark with these types of proclamations, no matter what kind of survey data they collect.

All the corollary evidence suggests that developer interest will overtake that of iOS. More Android devices are shipped and activated across the world every day than iOS, BlackBerry and Windows Phone. The Android Market is growing rapidly. Analyst firms love this type of parallel data. But will reality catch up with theory?

Ovum says, "despite a clear vie for ultimate supremacy between these two platforms, almost all developers will support both." That is more along the lines of reality than saying that "Android will be the top OS for developers in 2012."

Ovum's survey data says that the top two native platforms will retain dominance in the mobile application space despite the rise of HTML5 and mobile Web-based applications. The reason for this is that the ability to monetize and reach a broader audience still comes with iOS and Android more than mobile Web apps.

Developer sentiment comes down to two specific criteria: distribution and discovery. For mobile Web apps, those are the biggest problems. There is real centralized application store for HTML5 apps. Developer firms like appMobi will focus on that problem this year but there is a long road ahead of HTML5 apps to catch up with the likes of Android and iOS. Facebook could also eventually come out with a mobile app store of sorts though the company believes that the best way to distribute apps on the its social platform is through sharing among users.

Android and iOS still provide the best means of distribution and discovery. Third party app stores like the Amazon Android Appstore, GetJar or sites run through Appstores.com can provide limited discoverability but are likely secondary options for developers after pushing to the primary distribution channels of the Apple App Store and Android Market.

"A smartphone platform's success is dictated not only by the pull of consumers and the push of handset vendors and mobile operators but also by a healthy economy of applications delivered by third-party developers," wrote Adam Leach from Ovum. Therefore, it is important for all players in the smartphone ecosystem to understand the choices developers are making today and the downstream impact of those choices."

As noted may times before, the ability for developers to monetize their efforts will be the driving factor in which platforms they will publish to. Right now, iOS leads that charge but Android is making a push to standardize app development on the platform that could help its apps perform better in terms of purchases and in-app payments.

Source : http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2012/01/android-to-top-ios-in-develope.php

Android Hackers Plan App Store Of Banned Apps (GOOG)

An alternative to Google's official Android operating system called CyanogenMod has just surpassed the million-user mark, its makers say.

What's more, after being snubbed by Amazon, the developers are thinking of starting their own app store, outside of Google's control, that consists solely of legal apps kicked out the Android Market and ones that work on rooted phones.

"I've been bouncing this idea around for a while now," said Koushik Dutta in a public discussion on Google+. "We need an App Store for root apps. We also need an app store for apps that are getting shut down for no good reason, other than [that the] carrier, or some random corporation doesn't like it."

CyanogenMod has grown in popularity because it does things the official version of Android doesn't --  such as take screen captures -- and it may perform better than a phone's current version of Android. CyanogenMod also doesn't include the dreaded Carrier IQ, a hidden program that tracks everything you do and reports back to your telephone company, the company says.

But all this popularity comes with a problem. How to pay for the servers needed to support its growing community. So why not it's own App Store of legal-but-banned apps, with some proceeds going to support the CyanogenMod project?

"Apps removed from the Market include, one-click root apps, emulators, tether apps, Visual Voicemail apps, and more," Dutta explains. "I've actually approached Amazon about bundling their App Store in CM if they gave CM a cut of the sales. But they brushed me off, saying that was something they could talk about in a few months."

This isn't an entirely new idea, points out The Register. SlideME is an Android Market alternative, and it's been around since 2008. Then there's App Planet, which also seems to favor apps that others have shunned.

 But with 1 million users CyanogenMod has the power to make its banned-app store a big success.

Source : http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2012/01/23/businessinsiderandroid-hackers-plan.DTL

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Google's Android App Inventor gets open sourced, code has been released

In 2011, Google shut down their Google Labs' doors, leaving many, disappointed. Popular app "Android App Inventor" was handed over to MIT, as well as a decently sized donation to help fund a new mobile learning initiative.

What has happened between now and then? Well, behind closed doors, a lot it seems. Google and MIT have just announced the Android App Inventor source code, with both Google and MIT both pleased to announce the initial free and open-source release of App Inventor.

In a blog post on the new MIT website, with app designer Hal Abelson writing:

Google and MIT are pleased to announce the initial free and open-source release from Google of the App Inventor source code at http://code.google.com/p/app-inventor-releases/.

There's little supporting documentation yet, and we're not accepting contributions to the code now. That will happen later, after the MIT Center of Mobile Learning opens their App Inventor server to the public. We hope to nurture a robust and active open-source project eventually, but for now we don't want to distract the MIT developers from their efforts to complete and deploy the large-scale public server. In the meantime, we'll update the code periodically to match what's running at the latest MIT experimental system. We've also created a Google Group here for people working with the code to relate their experiences with the code, ask questions, help each other, etc.

People who create modifications from this code base are free to use the term "App Inventor" and the puzzle-piece Android logo in their work. MIT will be releasing its own versions under the name "MIT App Inventor", which is reserved for the systems actually coming from MIT.

Enjoy the code, and Happy Inventing!

Source : http://www.tweaktown.com/news/22374/google_s_android_app_inventor_gets_open_sourced_code_has_been_released/index.html

Fireplace controlled via iPhone or Android app

WiFi Fireplace

The new DX1500 gas fireplace from Escea, featuring connectivity to iPhones and Android devices via WiFi which can be used as a remote control, as well as high efficiency and the option for a single or double sided, see-through fireplace.

Designed with intelligent mobility in mind, users simply download the app and users can control the temperature, flame and time. The styles are simply stunning and offers up to 10 kW of heat, heat ducting technology that captures up to 90 percent of the available heat and returns it back into the room or into another room in the home altogether- the company says they are the world’s first. Brilliant!

Click any of the images below to enlarge:

Source : http://agbeat.com/design/fireplace-controlled-via-iphone-or-android-app/