As usual, good old Harry “Unleash” McCracken hits the nail on the head. Last quarter, US sales of Android phones beat the iPhone by about 7 percent with BlackBerry holding onto a 15% lead. OMG! Everybody panic.
The real reason, as Harry points out, is that Android is everywhere. The Droid is taking off and is surprisingly cheap – Amazon has them for $20 – and all carriers have an Android phone. Only one carrier has the iPhone and it’s the “bad” one, yet the iPhone still rules consistently hits the 20% mark in terms of market share. Pretty impressive for one handset on a carrier much maligned in the media and blogosphere, right?
Because of Apple’s stubborn insistence on doing things their way, they will lose market share to Android. You and I could build a phone right now out of spare radio parts and install Android on it. Everyone can. Therefore, it stands to reason that the Android will steal market share from Apple every chance it gets. In the end, it’s not really Apples to apples we’re counting here and until Apple takes a sane approach to carrier catholicism – and the carriers take a sane approach to control over the handset – things won’t change. However, you can buy 9900 AT&T Backflips for the price of one iPhone 3G. Which is hi-larious.