Android is big in tablets. The problem is that no one has a clue how big it is. While Apple happily reports its rising unit sales for tablets, Samsung and other major Android distributors keep mum. Hence, we're largely left in the dark as to just how many Android tablets are being bought and used.
But developers may help us understand Android's market penetration.
Android's 'Dark Matter'
By some estimates, Android will claim as much as 65% of the tablet market in 2014. IDC puts the number a bit lower, but by any estimate Android is booming.
As in smartphones, Android adoption is on overdrive due to giving consumers, particularly in developing markets, a low-cost alternative to Apple's premium pricing. Commenting on Android's rise, Canalys senior analyst Tim Coulling argues that "Apple’s decline in PC market share [which includes tablets] is unavoidable when considering its business model."
Well, maybe.
The problem is counting Android accurately. Asymco analyst Horace Dediu, commenting on Benedict Evans' analysis of Android use, highlights the difficulty in getting an accurate read on Android tablet adoption:
There are no firms which report their shipments
They are not sold through retail chains which normally are sampled in the US and Europe (NPD and GfK respectively.)
They don’t show up in browsing or ad transaction data
Google Play statistics are missing most of the activations since they are not sold as bona fide Google-sanctioned Android.
It should be easy to track Android adoption by measuring web traffic. Yet Android users lag considerably behind iOS users - on smartphones and tablets - when it comes to web usage, something I pointed out a year ago. Dediu posits that new Android tablets must be used as glorified video consoles, and maybe he's right.
But his more interesting suggestion is that we can track tablet adoption by measuring payments to developers.
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