According to the latest data from comScore, Google's Android platform is now the number one smartphone platform in the US:
69.5 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the three months ending in February 2011, up 13 percent from the preceding three-month period. Google Android grew 7.0 percentage points since November, strengthening its #1 position with 33.0 percent market share. RIM ranked second with 28.9 percent market share, followed by Apple with 25.2 percent. Microsoft (7.7 percent) and Palm (2.8 percent) rounded out the top five.
That second table showing OEM figures is particularly interesting. Apple gets so much attention that you would think they sell phones to more people than any other manufacturer. But the numbers say differently. They are far from that point, and they are losing the smartphone platform market to many of the same manufacturers they are lagging in the handset market.
Apple took smartphones from the business world and put them firmly into the hands of every day folks. Since then its been a tough battle for handset manufacturers to stay in without drastically changing their strategy. Remember when this was the coolest phone you could buy?
Motorola sold millions of those Razr phones - until the iPhone came out.
With the iPhone, Apple raised the bar beyond anything previously seen on a mobile phone. The whole industry just got pwned.
Motorola wasn't alone, Sony Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, HTC, LG and everyone else needed to lift their game if they were going to get out of this alive.
Then along came Google and their open source Android saviour.
Android was leaps and bounds ahead of where any of them were going to get on their own - and it came with an App Marketplace. With the operating system being provided for free, the handset manufacturers could spend more of their development budgets on designing better hardware and then customise the Android UI on their handsets so they could differentiate their handsets from the others using the same platform. This has been the best strategy for many handset makers to compete against the iPhone.
Do one thing and do it well
Apple has proven that they are great at concentrating their efforts on one thing and doing that really, really well. This has provided them great benefits in marketing, device compatibility and getting developers to build applications for the App Store. This strategy does have one weakness; there is only one current model of iPhone on the market at any one time.
Apple follows a very structured product release calendar. You can just about set your watch to it. They also have a very methodical product management system.
Just look at iPad 2. What is really different about it from the first iPad?
As far as hardware goes, thats pretty much it.
Look at the differences between the iPhone 3GS to the iPhone 4:
Keep going back through all their product releases and you will start to see a pattern of releasing one or two new features which keeps the hardware at parity at a "good enough" level rest of the market until the release of the next model (which is always at least 12 months away to keep carriers happy as they churn subscribers from one iPhone to the next every 12-24 months). It has been rumoured that the iPhone 5 is being delayed to maximise revenue from the Verizon CDMA iPhone 4.
With each Apple hardware releases comes a new iOS release. Apple doesn't like to iterate the OS out of sync with their hardware. When you buy Apple, you buy the hardware and software as a combined package. And whilst you might be able to run the new iOS version on an older device, it would be a tough sell to get you to buy the new iPhone if it had all the same software features of the old iPhone.
Iterate fast, and iterate often
Google don't sell hardware, so they dont have this problem. Through their rapid software iterations and the constant iterations of multiple hardware partners Google has been able to move quickly through the gaps that Apple has left behind in the marketplace. The Android operating system isn't bound to specific hardware releases so it has been able to innovate and develop very quickly. When the operating system is ready for production it is released to handset manufacturers who start using it in their product lines. There are well over 100 smartphones designed around Android. Apple has released just 4 phones that use iOS.
What if you need a physical keyboard? What if you need a bigger screen? What if you need a smaller handset? What if you need it to be waterproof? What if you dont want to spend more than $500 on a phone?
Using Android, the other handset manufacturers have been able to target these weaknesses in the Apple iPhone by building different devices for different users needs. With Android they have been able to offer what people love about the iPhone, but also all the things that many find are missing from it.
By iterating the operating system without being bound to any specific hardware iteration cycle Google has been able to gain an astounding amount of market share with Android in a very short amount of time.
