The Numbers No One Wants to Talk About in the Android vs. iPhone Sales Battle

Sent to you by Rio via Google Reader: The Numbers No One Wants to Talk
About in the Android vs. iPhone Sales Battle via Android Phone Fans by
Kevin Krause on 7/21/10





For all of those shocked and awed by the Apple’s announcement that as
of last Friday they had sold 3 million iPhone 4 handsets, I’d like to
take a moment to direct everyone’s attention over to John Battelle’s
Searchblog. In his post he takes a rather bold stance, one much of the
blogosphere hasn’t even entertained the idea of since Steve Jobs used
the smoke and mirrors sales figure to distract our tech reporting peers
from what has been dubbed “antennagate.” Kind of like shaking some
shiny keys in front of a bunch of spoiled babies or dangling a ball on
a string in front of a kitten. I can’t really put it any better than
Mr. Battelle did, so take a gander at this excerpt from the full post
that delves into a bit of simple arithmetic to show that the 3 million
figure might not be that impressive after all:

“3 million phones in 23 days – that’s a pretty strong clip, the fastest
sales of an Apple phone to date, Mashable reports. If I do the math,
that’s more than 130,000 phones a day.

But did anyone in the press notice Google’s little announcement, the
day before Apple launched its iPhone 4? This one? The one where Google
said, and I quote: ’Every day 160,000 Android-powered devices are
activated — that’s nearly two devices every second.’

Yep, that’d be 30K MORE phones a day than Apple. And my guess is that
Android’s pace is accelerating, while the iPhone 4 is probably sliding
downward, given how many folks bought it at launch (Mashable reports
that 1.7 million were sold in first three days, so 1.3 million the next
20 days). In fact, if you do THAT math, and divide 1.3 million by 20
days, you get 65,000 iPhone 4s sold each day, which is nearly 100,000
less, PER DAY, than Android phones.”

Granted, there is no denying that for a single handset a sales number
of 3 million is beyond astounding, but we’d also venture to say that if
iOS was dropping on the same number of smartphones as Android and at
the same frequency the figure would be spread out quite a bit more —
just as is the case with Google’s platform. If anyone should be scared
about the number of phones flying off the shelves it certainly
shouldn’t be Google in this case.

Will Android ever topple the iPhone? There will at least come a time
where the two are no longer separated by as wide a gap in market share.
A time when Google’s platform sits at the same level. Only true
innovation and the continued release of simply killer Android phones
will prove if Google has what it takes to become the top dog in the
handset world.

[thanks to Rob Isakson for sending this in!]

Things you can do from here:
- Subscribe to Android Phone Fans using Google Reader
- Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your
favorite sites