EngiGuide

Google’s Android mobile operating system will easily dominate the smartphone market by 2016, and it will be followed closely by Apple’s iOS.
Symbian captured about 36 percent market share in 2010 while Android was running on about 23 percent of all smartphones that shipped last year. Apple’s iOS held a solid 15 percent of the market share, while Research in Motion’s BlackBerry OS captured about 16 percent market share last year. Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 share was mere 0.6 percent.  Android market share will continue to grow in the next five years. Prediction says that Android will be running on about 45 percent of all smart phones by 2015.
The estimation says that Apple’s market share will increase by 20 percent in 2015, while RIM will touch 14 percent share. It is assumed that Samsung’s Bada operating system could touch a 10 percent market share in 2015. It is also estimated that Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 OS will have a market share of only 6.5 percent and Windows Mobile will witness even less than 0.5 percent of the mobile operating system market.

Among the Open-Source mobile platforms – MeeGo, Android and Symbian – Android is the clear winner. 500,000 new Android-powered phones and tablets are now being activated each day worldwide. This number is growing at 4% per week. In the last quarter, Apple sold about 19 million iPhones, for a daily activation rate of about 210,000. Including iPads and iPod touches in the survey, Apple’s activation rate was about 325,000.

Does this matter?

Mobile is becoming more like a platform game where the developers are building applications that run on top of mobile devices. These applications are making these devices more valuable to users – market share is a critical component. If Android holds a dominant market share, the way Microsoft’s windows did in the 1990s, Apple will get a setback & eventually iOS’s value as a platform will plunge.  Apple has learned several lessons from its failure in 1990s, one of the factor was competition in terms of price. iPhones and iPads cost the same or less than Android phones.

Apple still has an advantage that it didn’t have in the 1990s – Android is still a fragmented platform with so many different versions and customizations. Fragmentation of different versions of the Android Platform is still a problem for developers.

A smart move from Apple can be to work on the pricing model and plan to sell a ‘cheap’ iPhone to compete against Android threat.