Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology
Anders Borg writing about the fun and crazy world of mobile and Internet service technologies.
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Thursday, October 08, 2009
Android to dominate by 2012?
Android to grab No. 2 spot by 2012, says Gartner
Interestingly Symbian is expected to hold on until that time. Probably because of the clear dominance it has today in “smartphones”, compensating (for a time) for its age. Nokia will down the road focus on Maemo for advanced phones instead of Symbian.
It should be noted that Android doesn’t have a similar ecosystem as is surrounding Apple iPhone. Apple gets revenue from phone sales and after market music, applications etc. Apple also controls the operators, not the other way around. A privilege traditional phone manufacturers (the audience for Android) don’t have. Google will not get that much revenue from phones or platform sales (read: none), nor after market, unless they completely revamp their after market content strategy, introducing music, audio books, etc (read: anything that can be downloaded to a phone and charged for). It seems to me very unlikely that Google will get similar amounts of revenue as Apple gets from iPhones and related business. Google continues to be in the advertising business, almost completely, so I’m sure they will push that as part of the Android strategy.
For developers, broad success for Android is beneficial, as it will (hopefully) decrease the chances for other Linux based (yet UI/framework incompatible) platforms, including WebOS and LiMo, hence creating a less fragmented application landscape. Apple and Nokia will not use Android, that’s for sure, but most other manufacturers will.
If you haven’t noticed already, there are more mobile platforms than ever, which is both good and bad. Good because there’s continuous competition about the best user experience and developer support, causing an evolutionary jump. Bad because of the many platforms developers need to support (or have to ignore…).
