Gartner recently published a paper predicting the operating system market share within the smartphone segment in 2012. Symbian has about 40%, Android 14%, and iPhone 13.7%. As you’d expect, and as Gartner hoped, this has generated a myriad of articles and blog posts from Android and iPhone fans arguing about whether Android really will overtake the iPhone. Whilst you’d expect the majority of these articles to be the usual pathetic “[Apple/Google] are the most awesome and will rule the world”, I’ve been surprised that no-one seems to have highlighted the reasonably obvious price-point factor. So I thought I would.
There are approximately 1 billion mobile phones sold every year. As with any retail market these products are sold at a variety of price points. The iPhone price point addresses somewhere between 100 and 200 million of these devices (in 2012). But Android devices can, and are already, targeted at a far wider range of price points. I’d estimate that Android price points will address roughly 300-400 million of these devices (in 2012) and should be counted as “smartphones”.
So arguing whether Android or iPhone is better seems as irrelevant as arguing whether Toyota or BMW is better. In both cases the former covers a far wider set of price points and market segments and so should sell more units.
On the misunderstanding of... 