Android phones are clearly the future
Many technologists believe that mobile technology is going to take over our lives in the near future.
Personally, I have a hard time seeing such small devices ever take the place of PCs only because they are a little more awkward to use. Nevertheless, if the inevitable mobile revolution takes place, most people are betting that the Android will lead the way.
Android phones are selling at a rate of 300,000 a day
An article that was just published on Mashable today, Google Exec: More Than 300K Android Phones Activated Daily says that Google is coming close to selling half a million of these devices every day. The Android became more popular than the iPhone in the beginning of 2010 and has been capturing market share ever since.
iPhones are clearly losing popularity
When I started to do a Google News search for iPhones, the most popular article I found was 6 Tips for Turning Your iPhone into an Android Phone. The article does not downplay the iPhone, but it emphasizes that there are many features with the iPhone that customers are not happy with. Therefore, they can turn their iPhone into almost an Android clone.
There are four main reasons why Androids seem to be gaining an edge over iphones:
- It is easier to enable the jailbreak feature of Android phones. Many people are frustrated that the iPhone turns the feature off every time there is an update.
- Androids are open-source. Patches are quickly developed for problems and new software is developed regularly.
- Many people are frustrated with the way iPhones limit which Apps can be installed. They won’t allow anything with Google Voice, but Androids don’t seem to be censored like this.
- Android apps have a lot more freedom. In fact, they are almost like running on an actual machine, while Apple apps are much more tightly restricted.
It seems that Androids are much more versatile devices. Customers want smartphones that are going to give them the freedom to do everything they could on a computer. They also want to know they can rely on their phones to function properly and that more apps will be available in the future.
If you are going to take advantage of this trend, you should probably optimize primarily for the Android device. Androids are the wave of the future and are probably going to dominate the mobile market.
If you are going to use mobile marketing in your business, wouldn’t it make sense to optimize for the phone that is going to lead the market? The best analogy I can come up with is optimizing a website for Google and Yahoo. If you can optimize for both, then you should try to do so. However, if you have to choose one, Google will be your obvious choice.
It is possible that this trend may change over time, but as a rule of thumb we should always go where the numbers take us.