“Android phones aren’t gaining ground at Apple’s expense. Both Android and the iPhone are crowding their rivals out,” Jared Spurbeck writes for Yahoo News. “And most of their sales volume comes not from switchers from one platform to the other, but from people who are upgrading from a feature phone.”
“Android and Apple are having a feeding frenzy, on the market of people who haven’t bought smartphones yet. And when they’re done, they’re going to turn on each other,” Spurbeck writes. ” On average, Android phones are used far less for web browsing or buying paid apps; indeed, the data suggest that most Android phone buyers aren’t using them for much more than “featurephone” services. iPhones, meanwhile, are selling to people who are more willing (for whatever reason) to pay a premium for smartphones and apps. And it shows: No smartphone company even comes close to matching Apple for profit per handset sold.”
“The piles of money that Apple is sitting on equal even more spending on research and product development, plus the potential ability to monopolize the supply chain,” Spurbeck writes. “Maybe Android itself isn’t doomed. But its fragmentation has already started, and its ability to compete with the iPhone in the long run seems dubious… unless its goal is to become the neat featurephone OS, a la Symbian.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: To say nothing of the negative effects of Android and Android peddlers potentially losing dozens of patent infringement cases worldwide. It’s quite easy to imagine a not-too-distant time where Android simply becomes too expensive (royalties to Oracle Apple, etc.) or is forced to stop using patented IP and Windows Phone ’07 or something else becomes the also-ran phone assemblers’ OS of choice.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “just a jerk” for the heads up.]