After yesterday’s report, which more or less confirmed Apple’s dominance in mobile device industry, in terms of device usage, anyway, if the current Android trend continues on its upward climb, next year’s comScore report is going to look a little different. comScore’s study determined that, save for the United States, Apple devices are the dominant brand in regards to mobile web usage.
In the U.S., Android actually outperforms the iPhone, 35.6 percent to 23.5. If the a tweet by Google VP of Engineering Andy Rubin is true, expect that number to increase. Before going forward, it should be noted that the Android OS is available on a number of mobile phones, while Apple’s mobile OS is restricted to their line of iDevices. Because of that, Android phones are more abundant that iPhones, if only for the ability to be featured on multiple platforms. Mind you, this is not a declaration of quality on either side. This report is simply responding to the numbers being reported.
As for the tweet in question, it’s awfully revealing in terms of what to watch for:
@Arubin
Andy RubinThere are now over 500,000 Android devices activated every day, and it’s growing at 4.4% w/w
4 hours ago via web · powered by @socialditto
Late last year, Android’s activation number was reported as 300,000 activations per day, compared to Apple’s claim of 230,000. The question is, will Apple respond with a higher number than Android, now that the 500,000 activations per day gauntlet has been thrown down? It’s hard to expect otherwise. As one would guess, Androinica, a blog focusing on all things Android, responded quite favorably to the report, although, the post also shed some light on why Android grows somewhat faster than their Apple counterparts:
What I can tell you is that the demand for Android products continues to rise. Devices continue to come in all types of flavors and reach most corners of the globe. Now comes the hard part of finding a way to make that ecosystem of diverse gadgets and users play nice together. More attention needs to be paid to some corners of the Android map and some fragmentation issues need to be addressed
If you want an iOS-capable mobile device, you’re limited to an iPhone, iPad or iTouch. Meanwhile, there are more Android-capable devices than there are iOS-ready devices. A lot more, making the battle for proliferation a little easier to manage.