According to some stats published yesterday by Apple iPhone School, the iPhone is now sold in 80 countries. 13.7 million of the total 17 million phones were sold in 2008. If you include the iPod Touch—the iPhone without the phone—that figure jumps to 30 million total sales. The newer Android G1 is currently 4th in mobile web marketshare, well behind the older iPhone but likely to move into second by June. Earlier this month, CNet predicted the Android would catch the iPhone in sales by 2012.
The feature gap is closing
While the Android prepares for a year of new models to go with the current HTC phone, Apple was firing a volley to solidify its position as industry leader with an OS upgrade. Lifehacker’s Gina Trapani responded to iPhone 3.0 with a comparison of features available on the two smartphones. Included in the analysis—which shows Apple catching up to Android with a number of important features, most notably copy-and-paste—is this observation:
Personally, besides its Gmail client, the feature I love most about Android that the iPhone doesn’t come close to is Android’s pull-down “window shade” notification area, that lists multiple alerts. So if you’ve gotten an SMS, new email, a Twitter reply, a missed call, you can drag and drop the window shade down to see them all.
On the iPhone, such alerts show up as a pop-up window, forcing you to actively dismiss the box. Alerts of this nature are disruptive, interfering with your current task. My own limited experience with the Android confirms that the window shade notification is a well-designed interaction, especially coupled with the audible buzzing when new items are added to it.
An open market
It is the ecosystem of application development, though, that makes either of these smartphones interesting. Both devices have created a central repository for third-party applications that phone users can download to enhance the functionality of their devices. As is the case with Twitter’s API development, this strategy has the dual benefit of extending the core tools and creating sub-communities promoting and invested in the application platform.
For the iPhone, the free software developer kit (SDK) has been downloaded over 800,000 times with 50,000 developers actually making some money off of their work (most of these people had never developed Apple products until the iPhone). Only 2% of the 25,000 applications in the App Store had a development cycle longer than a week. In 9 months since it opened, the App Store has facilitated over 800 million downloads.
Statistics on the Android Market are difficult to come by. Medialets released some stats last fall when the Android Market first launched. A comparison with the App Store noted that the two companies took different strategies. Android was forthcoming about stats, but only released 62 applications (all free), or less than 10% of what Apple released when the App Store opened.
The paid applications in Android Market has only been open for about a month, however. According to Don Park, the top game application is a free one, Pac-Man, with over a quarter million downloads. The most successful for-pay applications are making an estimated $5-50K in the first month. The Foogloid blog recently did a “manual” tally of Android Market stats, counting 415 paid applications as of early March, with 6 receiving at least 1000 downloads.
The CNet article also reported that, for the first time, smartphone sales eclipsed laptops in annual sales. 162 million smartphones were sold in 2008. It is expected that about 1 of every 6 new phone purchases will be a smartphone, a statistic that will improve to 1 in 3 by 2013. Clearly, design and development for smartphone (mobile web and device applications) are the future.
Tags: Android, Android Market, App Store, Apple, applications, CNet, comparison, developer, G1, Google, HTC, iPhone, iPhone 3.0, marketplace, marketshare, new, news, OS, smartphone, statistics, third-party, trends, upgrade