Not a race, but a series
It’s hard to write about Apple’s most recent earnings report—let alone the reports on how 55% of the total smartphones sold by Verizon were iPhones, or the evidence that all iOS devices combined slightly outsold all Android devices combined last quarter—without sounding biased. If you like Apple, you’re going to be tempted to say “I told you so” (even if you didn’t); if you don’t, you’re going to be tempted to spin it, like the analyst John Gruber noted whose reaction was, in a nutshell, “I would have been right in my predictions about iPad sales going down if the iPad-buying public wasn’t stupid.”
There have been two narratives competing over the last year, one favoring Android and one favoring iOS, but it’s quite possible that both are true:
Android, by its very nature of being free to license and sprouting up on a myriad of devices, is clearly not only going to overtake iOS but outdistance it handily in terms of units shipped and sold.
Consistently, iPhones outsell Android devices on the same network by a big, big margin and Android is so far a non-starter in the tablet space. Thus, the advantages of Android’s license model don’t help it hold on to market share.
I’ve speculated in the past that more purchasers end up with Android phones rather than deliberately choose them over iOS, and Verizon’s results lend some credence to that speculation. We don’t know for sure what’s going to happen when we have our first full quarter of new Ice Cream Sandwich-based phones available that aren’t competing against a brand new iPhone, but the consumers in the “ended up with Android” not only don’t know what confection their phone is running, they don’t care. It’s the people who chose Android because it was Android who do, and—again, this is speculation, but I think there’s a lot of circumstantial evidence to support it—those people are a smaller percentage of Android owners than the percentage of iPhone users who specifically wanted an iOS phone.1
Yet I don’t think most Apple watchers—including those of us who figured that Verizon Android sales would drop once Verizon had the 4S available—really thought the first point above was going to be proven wrong. I still don’t think it will. It’s just that the tide of Android devices is going to be primarily composed of “free with contract” uglies, not the kind of cool phones that compete with the iPhone. (Which is not to downplay cool Android phones, which I suspect will get more competitive, not less.)
The other truth that I think might get lost in the momentarily triumphalism, though, is that there remains no intrinsic reason why not only two but even three or four mobile platforms can’t all thrive. Unlike the early days of microcomputing, smartphones have been born into a world of widely used platform-independent protocols and data formats. The “walled garden” metaphor has become very fashionable to bash Apple with, but it’s never been easier to switch platforms than it is now, even if your platform is iOS. People who long for the early days of computing have forgotten those were also the days where, when you switched platforms, you found that years of your writing was stored in proprietary word processing files on floppy disks that your new PC was physically unable to read.2
A year from now it’s very likely—although not a given—that Android will be back on top. Windows Phone might shoot up the charts, quadrupling its market share from negligible to inconsequential. Open WebOS might okay just kidding. But we all benefit from a market where whoever’s going “Ha! We’re #1!” each quarter knows that #2 isn’t all that far behind, and may even be ahead by some measures.
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Most wanted “an iPhone” rather than “an iOS phone,” but this is an advantage of Apple’s unified model. Some Android phones attain that I want this specific phone status, but I don’t think anyone expects, say, Samsung Galaxy S2 sales to come close to iPhone 4S sales. ↩
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WriteNow 3.x files on 800K Mac floppies, to pick a purely hypothetical example that I have certainly never personally experienced. ↩
