For example, if you're developing a business website, iOS dominates the market, because optimizing for Android is nigh impossible, and iOS users have more money, and spend more money (on average, your market segment may differ, mine does).
Or, if you're considering making an app, iOS dominates the market, because Android users don't like using apps, much less paying for them.
Apple makes more profit than any phone company in the world, by a very large margin.
That == Dominating mobile.
what?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_ph...
http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/14/revenue-gap-between-ios-and...
The "free with contract" or sub $400 market is a cut throat race to the bottom between Samsung and Xiaomi. Apple chooses not to enter that race (despite several journalists claiming they NEED a cheap phone to survive).
Yes,92% of industry profits is domination in my book. Without sustainable profits, marketshare is meaningless. Only profitable players are Samsung and Apple.
Androids huge sales are mostly low end of the market -- people who don't care about smartphones or computers, and just get whats cheaper with a 2 year contract.
Any proof?
Our US-only ecommerce site has 33% more visitors using Android than iOS. Our other US-only site has 2x more Android visitors than iOS.
I realize that sites vary by demographics, so I'm curious if you're just making this statement up, using your own site's stats, or found something that actually backs this up on the wider web.
http://fortune.com/2015/09/04/apple-tv-everywhere-share/ http://www.cnet.com/news/apple-outshines-android-in-us-mobil...
Or:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2014/08/03/ios-users-...
Or even this, which spins the issue:
http://www.businessinsider.com/android-is-beating-ios-in-web...
The latter is about Android "beating" iOs in web usage for the first time -- but in fact usage/users ratio is much higher in iOS, so you get more web usage from far fewer users.
>Our US-only ecommerce site has 33% more visitors using Android than iOS. Our other US-only site has 2x more Android visitors than iOS.
Depends if it attracts the demographic who would opt for cheaper Android phones.
My numbers are from several generic articles (by ad companies, sites etc) on the respective platforms web use.
Apple does reap the lion's share of profit from smartphone sales, but they don't dominate smartphone use.
Of course it is -- there are way more of those Android units.
But I wanted to point which users are more active, not mere volume. Even in the US Android could have more volume, but iOS users still generate far more traffic (not as total: as traffic per head).
If the 10% or 5% iOS users in a country generate the 20% or 30% of web traffic, then they are much more heavier tech/web users than the others.
If the market leader has 90% market share and they grow to 95%, they have grown a lot less than you relatively (so the minor player can claim they have grown the most) but they now own a bigger piece of the pie than they used to.
This is why you should always be skeptical of anyone who uses relative numbers (growth) instead of absolute ones: the reality is probably that they have lost market share.
Which is what we have seen Apple do compared to Android these past three years.
You will notice that the early keynotes right after the iPhone and iPad came out were showing absolute numbers in shipments and dollars, and now, they just stick to percents and vague claims ("We're growing the fastest").
For example, below appears to be the report Cook used for his "+14% vs -0.4%" slide, which at best, is very misleading.
"In the worldwide mobile phone market (inclusive of smartphones), vendors shipped 464.6 million units, down -0.4% from the 466.3 million units shipped 2Q14.[1]"
Truth is, the smartphone market actually GREW by 11.6% (Q2 2014:302.1m => Q2 2015:337.2m).
1980: Apple has 10% of a 100,000,000-phone market. We could call this a gap of 90,000,000.
1981: Apple has 15% of a 200,000,000-phone market. We could call this a gap of 170,000,000. What happened was that while Apple's market share grew, it grew much slower than the market itself.
I guess you might want to look at the world that way; for example, if you wanted to know how difficult it would be to convince the entire market to switch to your product. But I tend to agree that market share would seem to be more useful for most purposes.
Just saying, I think Apple is still a pretty innovative company.