Category: Uncategorized

Buoyed by the Galaxy S III smartphone and the Galaxy Note II “Phablet” and sales of flatscreens to all manner of companies — including their rival, Apple — Samsung made over $8 billion in profit during the most recent quarter. They’ve managed to move almost 500 handsets a minute, selling about 15 million Galaxy S IIIs and another 8 million Galaxy Note IIs.

Neil Mawston, executive director at market researcher Strategy Analytics, said that his firm predicts that Samsung will sell 290 million smartphones this year, up from a projected 215 million for 2012. Kiwoom Securities’ analyst, Kim Sung-in, has an even bigger estimate: he predicts Samsung shipping 320 million smartphones in 2013, with tablet sales doubling to 32 million.

The latest numbers for ComScore’s MobiLens numbers have come in. For November 2012 in the U.S., they say that Android had 53.7% of the market share followed by iOS, with 35.0%. Combined, that’s nearly 90% of the U.S. mobile market: a Google/Apple duopoly.

Here’s a table based on ComScore’s latest data showing U.S. mobile market share by vendor:

Smartphone Vendor	Aug 2012 Share	Nov 2012 Share	Change
Google	52.6%	53.7%	+1.1%
Apple	34.3%	35.0%	+0.7%
RIM	8.3%	7.3%	-1.0%
Microsoft	3.6%	3.0%	-0.6%
Symbian	0.7%	0.5%	-0.2%

Recovering Windows Phone Champ that I am, it pains me to see that Microsoft’s share has dropped from 3.6% to 3.0% (it also relieves me that I’m no longer involved with that train wreck). It’s a far cry from Gartner’s predictions — and yes, I’m going to keep pointing back to them from time to time: they said that by now, they expected Windows Phone to have made off with nearly 11% of the market.

With the increasing abandonment of BlackBerry devices and the Galaxy S III passing security muster at a number of corporations, Samsung is reportedly making big pushes into the enterprise market for 2013. According to Reuters, SAP has standardized around the Galaxy S III, Galaxy Note and Galaxy Tab devices. SAP’s CIO says that “the one clear trend in enterprise is the shift away from one device to multiple devices” and “because of the fragmentation of the Android software, we decided to go with just one Android company and we went with Samsung”.

On the more personal side, reports of Apple fans taking up Android devices and enjoying them continue to pop up. I myself picked up a Galaxy S III a month ago and have made it my primary phone for the time being. It’s quite enjoyable, and I have yet to find an app that’s iPhone-only that I miss. I’m enjoying my stay in Android-land.

A notable convert is mobile app developer Grandcentrix’ CEO Ralf Rottmann. He was a die-hard Apple fan, but in a popular article on Gizmodo titled An iPhone Lover’s Confession: I Switched to the Nexus 4. Completely., he writes that he’s fallen in love with Android:

I find it to be better in terms of the performance, smoothness of the rendering engine, cross-app and OS level integration, innovation across the board, look & feel customizability and variety of the available apps.

This article also appears in Mobilize!: The CTS Mobile Tech Blog.

…aside from the language itself (I kid because I care):

By Orange and Bronze Software Labs. Found via Dare Obasanjo.

Ed Bott is that rarest and most curious of creatures — a Windows fan — so it shouldn’t be surprising that when Apple reported that they hit the 40 billion downloads from the App Store, with nearly half of that in 2012, his take-away from the news was that the numbers were good for Apple and less so for developers. At no point does he make any mention of the vast sums of money one can make on the Windows Phone marketplace, because no such opportunities exist. Speaking as a former Windows Phone Champ, I think I can safely say that my one post about ridiculous Windows Phone market share predictions has made more money through Google AdSense than most Windows Phone apps.

In the Wall Street Journal blog Digits, Matthew Lynley says that these 40 billion apps have led to $7 billion in payouts to developers. He also notes that the rate at which developers are being paid is accelerating, from a total of $2.5 billion total in July 2011 to $4 billion in March 2012.

It should be noted that a mere 25 developers accounted for half the revenue in the U.S. App Store (for iPhone apps only) and Google Play in the first 20 days of 2012, according to the analytics firm Canalys.

There’s always a lot of that repeated mantra, “Android is Winning”, but according to Kantar WorldPanel’s data, iOS is leading the pack in smartphone OS sales. For the 12-week period ending November 25th, 2012:

• iOS surpassed the 50% of phones sold, acquiring 53.3% of the market
• Android dropped 10%, down to 41,9%
• Windows Phone held steady at 2.7%

An interesting observation from Kantar:

Of those who purchased an iPhone in November, 27% upgraded from another smartphone OS, 34% upgraded from a previous iPhone and 40% upgraded to their first smartphone.

iOS developer Andrew Rauh has put together a list of things he’s learned as a freelance iOS developer. You should read his article for the details, but here’s a quick summary:

1. Be picky with your clients. 
2. Reuse code.
3. Always ask for at least half the cost of the project up front.
4. Keep communication consistent, but don’t allow clients to be obsessive.
5. Anticipate the worst.

Justin Benson asks an interesting question: Would Instagram make it today, as an iOS-only app? He writes:

Would Instagram make it today purely on an iOS only strategy? One answer is Yes. There are many more iOS devices in play today then when they launched. The potential audience is therefore much larger. So they numbers would indicate it’s more than doable.

Yet what would we think of someone who tried to just support one platform? Would it indicate closed mindedness? Elitism? Out of touch with the broader world? Would it say “These guys just don’t get it!” – even to many iOS users?  Would it make you wonder about just how good a product they can build if those are some of their foundational qualities?

And now, a number of coding links…

• NSLogger: A high perfomance logging utility which displays traces emitted by client applications running on Mac OS X or iOS. It replaces your usual NSLog()-based traces and provides powerful additions like display filtering, image and binary logging, traces buffering, timing information, etc.
• Determining a user’s most important contacts on iOS: “Many iOS apps provide an ‘invite your friends’ feature. From a usability design perspective it is desirable that the app suggests friends that are likely to be invited by the user. This article explains an App Store-legal heuristic that guesses the most important contacts in a user’s address book on iOS. Additionally, it provides an example implementation and a demo application under the MIT license.”
• Mosaic UI: A tiled UI for iOS that does automatic layouts based on the tiles’ sizes.
• Real-time iOS filesystem monitoring: Security Aegis have an article covering the use of filemon.ios to watch applications as they drop files to the app filesystem as well as automate the finding of of all kinds of M1 Insecure data storage vulnerabilities.
• Demystifying iOS application crash logs: An article at the always useful RayWenderlich.com site: “you’ll learn about some common crash log scenarios, as well as how to acquire crash logs from development devices and iTunes Connect. You will learn about symbolication, and tracing back from log to code. You will also debug an application that can crash in certain situations.”

This article also appears in Mobilize!: The CTS Mobile Tech Blog.

Have a great new year! Regular posting will resume on Monday, January 7th.

I had no idea that Edward Tufte’s 1974 classic, Data Analysis for Politics and Policy, was available for download for free on his site. Almost 40 years have passed since it was published, and not only is the math still valid, but in this age of open data, readily-available computing power, tools like the R programming language and a polarized political atmosphere that needs less party line and more data, this book may be even more useful today.

For the moment, it seems that the iPad is the only tablet that matters. While it’s difficult to get a direct measure of the numbers of types of tablets out there, there are a number of ways to approximate those numbers through indirect means.

Indirect Metric #1: Ad Impressions

The iPad family of tablets account for the vast majority of ad impressions seen on tablets in North America. According to the December 2012 Tablet Market Update put out by the online advertising network Chitika, for every 100 iPad impressions, the other tablets combined have less than 15. Here’s how those less-than-15 impressions break down:

These numbers come from a sample of “tens of millions” of impressions from Chitika’s ad network seen U.S. and Canadian tablet users from December 8th through 14th, 2012. For every 100 iPad impressions for the aforementioned user base during the aforementioned period, other tablets produced the following numbers of impressions:

Tablet	Number of impressions per 100 iPad impressions
Amazon Kindle Fire	4.88
Samsung Galaxy Tablets	3.04
Google Nexus Tablets	1.22
Asus Transformer	0.93
Barnes & Noble Nook	0.91
Acer Iconia	0.76
Toshiba Thrive	0.60
Motorola Xoom	0.59
Other Android Tablets	0.45
Microsoft Surface	0.22
HP Touchpad	0.18
Unidentifiable Android	0.17

Chitika’s numbers seem to indicate that the iPad family of tablets generate over 87% of U.S. and Canadian tablet web traffic. While this is a slight decrease — it was over 88% a month ago — it looks as though Apple will continue to dominate web traffic for the foreseeable future.

Indirect Metric #2: First Tweets

Here’s a graphic created by one A. X. Ian, who goes by @axian on Twitter, showing the results of his search for the phrase “First tweet from” followed by iPad, Kindle, Nexus and Surface:

Ian’s search was performed on Christmas Day, from 5 a.m. to 5 p.m. PST, which he describes as “plenty of time for lots of people to open their presents”. Here’s his count of tweets at the end of the 24-hour sampling period:

Tablet	Number of “First time on this tablet” tweets
Apple iPad	1,795
Amazon Kindle	250
Google Nexus	100
Microsoft Surface	36

Indirect Metric #3: Store Wars

The scene in the video above — recorded at Lone Tree, Colorado’s Park Meadows Mall on Black Friday — seems to be playing across the U.S. and Canada, wherever Apple and Microsoft stores are in the same mall. This pretty much captures what’s happening in CTS’ home town of Toronto, where there are both an Apple Store and a Microsoft Store in Yorkdale Mall, as well as in Century City Mall in Los Angeles:

Meanwhile, in China and Hong Kong, Business Insider reports that there’s an “insatiable demand” for the iPad Mini.

Indirect Metric #4: Go on a Flight and Look Around

I fly about once a month, and both in the lounge and on the plane, I see more and more tablets. Some people do their work, some read, and some bring them as their own personal in-lounge/in-flight entertainment units. No matter what they’re using their tablets for, the one thing that binds them together is that by and large, they’re iPads.

This article also appears in Mobilize!: The CTS Mobile Tech Blog.

Before we get back to the serious business of mobile industry statistics, let’s have a little fun. We’ll share some photos of mobile products that we at CTS most emphatically do not recommend:

The “iPhone8”: Somehow, we suspect that this isn’t an official Apple product — in fact, it’s not even a phone. Looking at this photo, one can almost hear the lawyers in Cupertino sharpening their knives.

iArm: It probably creates more problems that it purports to solve, but it’s nowhere near as bad an idea as…

iDrive: We have trouble imagining someone giving this as a gift and thinking “Yes. This will end well.”

This article also appears in Mobilize!: The CTS Mobile Tech Blog.