New data from Canalys released on Monday shows that Apple took the top spot in the U.S. as the best-selling smartphone vendor in the country. Apple's 26.2 percent share edged Research in Motion's 24.2 percent, giving Apple the greatest shipments of any vendor in the U.S., which is the largest smartphone market in the world.
However, Canalys also found that devices running Google's Android mobile operating system represented 43.6 percent of U.S.shipments in the third quarter of 2010. Worldwide, Android grew 1,309 percent from the same period a year ago, from 1.4 million shipments in the third quarter of 2009 to more than 20 million units during the three-month span this year.
"With Samsung, HTC, Motorola and Sony Ericsson all delivering large numbers of Android devices, and with focused efforts from many other vendors, such as LG, Huawei and Acer, yielding promising volumes, the platform continues to gather momentum in markets around the world," said Canalys Senior Analyst Pete Cunningham.
"Android has been well received by the market and in some geographies it is becoming a sought-after consumer brand. It has rapidly become the platform to watch, and its growing volumes will help to entice developers, ensuring consumers have access to an increasingly rich and vibrant mobile content and application ecosystem."
The numbers show a total of 9.1 million smartphones running Android from the Open Handset Alliance being shipped in the third quarter of 2010. That was ahead of the estimated 5.5 million iPhones sold in the three-month frame. Research in Motion's BlackBerry came in third in the mobile operating system race, shipping an estimated 5.1 million, followed by Microsoft with 600,000.
Recent studies have repeatedly shown that Android-based smartphone shipments have eclipsed Apple's iPhone in 2010. Some have shown that Android's growth was not slowed by the launch of the iPhone 4 this summer.
Apple and Android have publicly disputed one another over new device activation numbers throughout 2010. But on last month, Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs admitted that Android outsold the iPhone in the June quarter, citing numbers from Gartner which he said he believes are "pretty accurate."
Jobs said during his company's quarterly earnings call that in the June quarter, many customers were waiting to buy the iPhone 4. He said his company is waiting to find out what happened in the September quarter, but it's hard to track because there is no "solid data" on how many Android devices are shipped each quarter.
Apple just had its best quarter ever, selling a record 14.1 million iPhones. That helped the company achieve 70 percent growth in profits to $4.31 billion.
233 Comments
So it still took the collective forces of gazillion different models of Android to outsell the 3GS and 4.. I'd like to see the OHA broken up to the individual manufacturers and see how they're doing.
Gads... I hope that bloody at&t exclusive ends soon. Apple's desire for a secure return with at&t has ceded so much ground to Android, it's like the desktop wars all over again with Android playing the part of Windows. Fulfill the pent-up demand for the iPhone, Apple!
Android may be doing well now, but I don't think it has legs. That platform is going to suffer from fragmentation and related entropy much more so than Windows has in the computer world due to the looser standards imposed by Google. That, combined with Apple's relatively strong position in terms of economies of scale (by "relatively" I mean compared to where they are with the Mac vs Windows), means that predictions of this being another Windows beats Mac situation are way off base.
In short, Apple is on its game like never before, and Android is a hollow Windows imitator. I'm not worried about Apple's chances.
I believe that people who buy Android phones instead of iPhones overwhelmingly do so for only two reasons:
1. In the USA, they want to use Verizon instead of AT&T
2. They can't afford an iPhone and, generally speaking, have a very small amount of disposable income.
Gads... I hope that bloody at&t exclusive ends soon. Apple's desire for a secure return with at&t has ceded so much ground to Android, it's like the desktop wars all over again with Android playing the part of Windows. Fulfill the pent-up demand for the iPhone, Apple!
It's radically different from the desktop wars. Apple never had the kind of marketshare with the Mac that it has with the iPhone, and Apple never had the kind of financial strength that it has now. Plus, Android is a hollow imitator of the Windows business model. Google is depending on (and ceding power to) their OEM partners much more heavily than MS ever did, which is going to lead to fragmentation and degradation of the Android brand.