While other carriers might finally be dipping their toes in the Android water this month, T-Mobile has been in this game for a long time. They got their first Android phone (the G1) out last October, and managed to launch two more (the myTouch and the CLIQ) within the year. It makes sense, then, that they’re the first to pipe up with some usage details.
T-Mobile today shared a few interesting Android statistics, and announced a number of ways they’d be increasing their support for the Android Market.
All of the details T-Mobile shared involve the T-Mobile myTouch specifically – it is, after all, their flagship Android phone. It would have been nice to get some more general Android usage stats, but we’ll take what we can get:
- Around 50% of myTouch users launch the Market app each day
- 80% of myTouch users launch the browser once a day, and roughly 66% launch it more than once a day
- More than 40% of myTouch users access social sites multiple times each day
- Roughly half of myTouch owners say they have “completely customized” their handsets, though that term seems a bit ambiguous
T-Mobile’s not set on just dumping out the hardware, though. It’s unarguable at this point that the App catalog on any given platform makes or breaks the experience (psst, hey Palm – pay attention), and it seems like T-Mobile realizes this. They’ve announced a handful of ways they’ll be aiming to improve the market for their customers:
- Carrier Billing is coming “soon”, allowing users to charge app purchases back to their phone bill rather than Google Checkout. This is great news for developers – I’d imagine that this streamlining of the purchasing process will cause a huge uptick in sales from T-Mobile customers.
- T-Mobile has recently refreshed their “App Pack” to include a total of 34 T-Mobile suggested apps
- By Thanksgiving, T-Mobile will have a specific section of the Android Market which users can tap into to view a list of T-Mobile’s favorites. This is a feature of the revised Market that came with Android 1.6. The Droid, for example, already has a Verizon channel – but at this time, it’s currently only listing a Verizon-friendly Visual Voicemail app