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Gartner: Android Will Be Challenging for World's No. 1 Mobile OS by 2014

September 10, 2010 at 9:02 am PT

Between its technology and its business model, Google’s Android is moving inexorably toward the top of the worldwide mobile OS heap, according to the latest projections from Gartner. The research outfit expects Android’s market share to move past RIM’s and Apple’s into the No. 2 spot this year, and be running neck and neck with Nokia’s Symbian for the lead by 2014. Over that period, Gartner sees Apple holding steady, RIM dropping back and Microsoft remaining a minor player.

Tagged with Android, Apple, frontpage, Gartner, Google, market share, Microsoft, mobile OS, newsbyte, Nokia, RIM, software, Symbian, telecom

comments so far. Add yours.

Anonymous

Completely ridiculous fantasy in every possible way.

Apple is many, many times bigger than all Android OEM’s combined, and takes massive economies of scale because they make few devices that sell in enormous quantities, so they order incredible amounts of the same components at greatly reduced cost. iOS is over 50 times more profitable than Android OS. Android has no cheap Wi-Fi only devices, and no equivalent to iPad, iPod touch, or iPod nano. The cheapest Android devices are $500, while there are iOS devices at $159, $179, and $229.

It’s counterintuitive to tech analysts, but Apple is the one who is exploiting economies of scale and cheap devices, not Android. It’s Apple who is setup to sell in truly massive amounts. A phone version of iPod nano could be free with contract and by itself could outsell all of Android.
Anonymous

As the telcos exercise increasing control over android phone development, the race to the bottom will accelerate. Because of the economy of scale hurdle, the android oems make razor thin profits, hobbling their future r&d capacities. The android smart phones will be increasingly like the feature phones of pre-iPhone 2007: low quality, high volume cheap clone phones, with a whole lot of market share but not much to show for it.

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