For years, I haven't been able to wrap my brain around these reports from experts. Anything ranging from Nielson ratings to JD Power rankings, to niche market surveys peddled to industry alum for thousands of dollars.

Today is no different, take a look at the mobile phone report from ComScore for this past quarter.

The highlight is that Android handsets as a whole are (and have been) supposedly collectively kicking Apple's ass. Right now pegged at 51% in the US versus 30% for Apple. Even if we accept those numbers, let's look at the increase from the previous quarter to this last one. Android 3.7 and iOS 1.1.

Ok... Now let's look at what all the mobile operators have been reporting - keeping in mind that they're governed by SEC reporting rules. Every one of the top three mobile operators in the US reported that they sold more iPhones than *all* Android handsets combined last quarter. They've previously announced similar feats.

I know there are a number regional carriers and T-Mobile, by honestly, I can't see how they can swing the numbers like this. Especially since a lot of regional players are also selling iPhones and added to that Apple is also selling iPhones. How do these guys come up with 3.7 vs 1.1?

Frankly, if I paid $3000-6000 (again) for a market report I'd be a little pissed off that it was mostly made-up horse shit.

I used to work for a market research* company that sold industry reports that sold for a thousand pound and upwards (this was over 10 years ago). We made lots of our figures up

It always amuses me when the same company I worked for is quoted in the press or one of their "analysts" is interviewed on the TV/radio.

* the research amounted to reading trade journals and badgering marketing managers on the phone for their opinion on industry trends and their own sales. It really did come down to guessing whether a given market sector had gone up or down and phoning them and saying "I think the Italian fish food market has gone up by 2% this year" and waiting to hear their reaction.

Oh and if we didn't get any data on Italian fish food for the year, we'd just assume it was going the same way as Spanish fish food (assuming we'd got a figure for that) and just tweak the figures a bit so they didn't look too suspicious.

(that is the sound of me rushing off to make sure said company isn't on my LinkedIn profile )

I wonder how many handsets are NOT sold by the mobile operators, sold through other outlets?

Perhaps that makes up the discrepancy?

Looks like you aren't the only one to notice, this article shows how NPD makes up their reports.

http://www.businessinsider.com/apples-us-smartphone-marketshare-versus-android-for-q1-2012-5

MG Siegler wrote about the very same thing: http://parislemon.com/post/22211607603/sales-versus-surveys


These numbers, in addition to being made up, are supplemented by surveys. The real numbers however show that iOS is in the lead in at least three metrics. Mindshare (development of and downloading of apps), units (real sales figures) and profit share. The real unit share numbers help to paint a more balanced picture of profit share, which without the real units, seems only more astronomical.

This all leaves me puzzled on one last front. The apparently bullshit and totally made up numbers given on a repeated basis by Android lead Andy Rubin for daily activations. They have never fit with any other metrics. Never fit with the number of total devices in use, never fit with the numbers reported by carriers. If these numbers aren't a complete fabrication/lie, then what are they?

Bruno bait.

+1

Sadly they are more then just troll bait for Bruno though. False numbers like this have real business consequences. Crap "market research" numbers is one major reason my current employer had to cut a majority of my team a bit over a month ago. Who knows how many people are being impacted by false marketshare numbers for the mobile platforms.

I'd say ammunition. Because I'll discuss, but I consider myself tuned into at least this subject matter, not to fall for (bite) their BS.

Could it be something to do with how many times owners do factory resets?

Do they count as activations?

I guess then we should all bow down to Symbian as the true master of the universe, at least based on browser stats. No, wait, it's actually Apple, based on somebody else's stats.

Making any decisions based on these stats could get you in trouble. Example: when I was interning at Netscape in 1996, I remember that they decided to double-down on support for Win3.1, since it still had a significant market share. Clearly, that wasn't a bright decision.

More fantasy, this time from NPD: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-5742919...artphone-sales/

The other thing to note here is the hacks at CNET reporting on this as fact. Do they do this for only NPD? Since the numbers from the various survey firms don't even come close to matching, how do they pick which one to base their "factual" reporting on?

I think they'd be better off doing some actual investigation themselves and then writing a story about how the numbers from these firms are bunk. But then again, CNET has always been a cesspool of reporting and accuracy, so why change now?

NPD tends to get direct retail data, at least in the games industry. Would be interesting to see their raw reports to get a better feel for where their numbers come from. For games, their current growing blindspot is digital distribution.

Someone in the comments thread there said 29% of the US mobile market is prepaid, and 79% of those are now smartphones. No source though for his numbers, so who knows. Even with 79% of 29% likely being all Android, their overall numbers still don't make sense.

I think the 79% Smartphone figure for pre-paid seems rather high. I'm willing to bet that in the US, most prepaid phones/airtime are for illicit use. Spies, drug dealers, organized crime, unorganized crime with shitty taste in phones, etc. There's a reason they're known as "burners."

...moms who don't use the phone much...

I will likely use prepaid when I return to the US for roughly one year in 2013-14. I don't fall into any of those categories. For some people, prepaid just is a better option.

Also, remember that with prepaid you can bring your own unlocked phone (with many carriers). I don't plan on using a "burner."

I have been using a pre-paid number for 3 years. For 1.5 years with my iPhone 4, and don't fit into any of those categories either. But I'm in Canada and in the minority. The prepaid company I'm with doesn't even sell smartphones. Why would they? They don't offer data. In Canada there's no such thing as pre-paid per-use data. You'd have an easier time finding a unicorn. There are some scammy pseudo-offerings from the bigger players like Bell, but they're just monthly plans without a contract and with barely any data.

Matt, I love Mad Men too, but I don't pigeon hole women that way. Some of them even drive now. And for someone who doesn't use a phone much, a dumb or feature-phone would serve the purpose (and wallet) a lot better than a smartphone. I don't see moms dropping 5 to 8 bills on a phone they're not gong to use much. If the number "in use" is truly in the 70th percentile, then my hypothesis is that the majority of those phones are off-contract re-use, not new purchases.

Anyone paying attention to jokers like NPD to make financial decisions might as well be rolling dice or having a monkey running their finances.

BTW, someone (NPD perhaps) should ask T-Mobile why they're rolling out a 1900MHz network by the end of the year... I can only think of one reason.

"smart" phones don't have to cost many hundreds of dollars though. There is a Samsung one on the market here for under £90 and and HTC one for not much more.

Just because you think it makes more sense for those people to buy dumb phones, that doesn't mean that is necessarily what they are doing

I went the other way for skiing: rather than take my smartphone on the slopes (where it might get broken, and the battery live would suck even more than it already does), I bought a PAYG Nokia 100 and put my contract SIM in it. The battery lasted the entire trip on one charge, and still had about 30% left when I got home.

But those phones don't count toward the total of newly sold phones. And I know it accounts for a large number of pre-paid customers. A few friends, my wife and I are in that camp. Well technically I bought my phone at full price unlocked and then started immediately using it with pre-paid, so there was no previous contract.



You're right. I did just find some Android devices for around $100 after discounts. But they're years old and locked to the provider. Which is still absolutely valid to compute sales figures, I was sidetracked thinking current and unlocked mistakenly.

From the prepaid companies operating in my area however, I still see that the vast majority of their offerings are dumb/feature phones. And as Tom mentioned, even if they weren't, it's unlikely the totals contribute significantly to the discrepancy we're seeing from these analysts.

(A slight continuation of the market share numbers being discussed in the Google IO thread, figures this one was more appropriate)

Thanks to the Apple vs Samsung court case, we are starting to see how so completely off the mark IDC is, and many of the other reports.

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/08/10/a...ung-sold-37000/



IDC tried to come back and claim Samsung tablets also includes their Windows 7 lineup. Raise your hand if you have ever seen one of these in the wild outside a store shelf, or the units Microsoft handed out to developers. I somehow doubt that makes up for the wide gap.

The other tidbit here is also how big the iPod Touch market really is. For iOS targeting developers, it's viable, but never shows up when only looking at smartphones. From the numbers, 2008-2010 saw about a 1:1 parity of Touch to iPhone sales. 2011 and 2012 the sales have fallen off quite a bit, making the total ratio closer to 2 iPhones to one iPod touch. Still a rather sizable market typically excluded in the mobile OS "faux marketshare" numbers.

I don't think anyone here expected Samsung's tablet sales to be anything significant yet. They're currently the world leader in smartphones by a large margin, but still a neophyte in tablet-land.

Where they stood a year and a half ago (the era of the historical court documents) was never really discussed here.

If the IDC numbers were so dramatically off for tablets, how can we be sure they were accurate for the phones?

According to their Q1 2012 numbers for Samsung Android smartphones, 40.8 million were shipped. (source) According to the court documents, 2.5 million were sold in the US. (I'm picking Q1, as the court documents lack Galaxy S III sales for Q2). Even with phones, we have a massive discrepancy.

40.8 worldwide, 2.5 US would put the percentage split at 93.9%/6.1%. That still makes no sense.

I'm not sure what the concern is, but more than just IDC have been finding Samsung outselling Apple at about 2:1 in the smartphone market over the past months. The Galaxy S-III was a 2012-Q2 product, and it is responsible for a lot of those sales.

I just think it's great to have real competition again, and not have a single USA company dominating the global market.

Cheers

More sources doesn't mean the numbers are accurate. The court documents are some of the first verifiable sales numbers I've seen for either side. It's showing that Apple was indeed telling the truth about their sales numbers (as required by their SEC filings, but still could hide the iPod Touch a bit), and that numbers for Samsung, the largest Android vendor are off by quite a bit.

Gartner for Q1 2012 is reporting Samsung Android sales were ~32.4 million. A difference of 8.4 million from IDC, and a Worldwide/US split of 92.3%/7.7%. Again the split seems off compared to other verifiable numbers.

The Strategy Analytics post you linked to earlier doesn't break out Android sales, just overall smartphone sales. I can't find good numbers from them on Q1 2012 in the US without jumping a $7,000 paywall.

I agree with you on the real competition part. It is good and is bringing improvements across the board. USA vs some other company I don't personally care much about, as long as there are strong enough companies around to create jobs in my neighborhood. Both Samsung and Apple happen to be in the neighborhood here.


The concern for me is with false information turning into reality. This is the tech industries speculation market. Why does it personally interest me? Just a few months ago I had to say farewell to 118 full time coworkers, and additional contractors due to false speculative numbers. Expanding out of tech, we have speculation driving prices on so many commodities with no basis in reality. But the speculation does do real harm when it drives prices up, and pushes more money out of other areas of the economy.

I know the world is not a very honest place. What frustrates me though is that as we continue into this information age powered by the computing devices in front of us, the false information still thrives. Possibly more so now then in the past. Even here, yourself and others just dismiss the false info as "Bruno bait".

I'm taking much more notice, to at least try and find a job in a company that has people who properly understand the market they are in. By doing the deeper research on these numbers, I can ask better questions in an interview before considering their offer.

Anyone who reports iPad as anything under 90% of the total tablet market is completely of base. 90% is what I consider a completely conservative estimate of Apple's complete domination in this space.

And while Android phones are doing markedly better, they're still doing crap compared to the iPhone. You have to consider than while estimates may be that Android commands 50%+ of the Smartphone market, Android phones account for nearly 100% of all smartphone models available. And well over 90% of all mobile phones of any kind in some markets/locations. With that kind of retail presence, 50-60% marketshare is, IMO, nothing to write home about. Google's reported activation numbers are fantasy and don't ever add up with the numbers reported by the carriers and manufacturers for sales.

I'd like to see competition drive usability, because IMO, while I feel iOS leads Android significantly in this regard, there is TONS of room for improvement. If you want a really frustrating experience, try doing anything at all with multiple iOS devices. There's no way to communicate between two or more devices built-in. Minimal amount if you are both connected to the same wireless network, but nothing if you're not. Even though all the devices have WiFi and Bluetooth. Want to use AppleTV without an existing wireless access point? Forget it, you can't. Think you might create an ad-hoc wireless network using your iPad or iPhone (or AppleTV)? Forget it, can't be done.