[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held...
Quoting:
> Apple iOS continues to hold its large share of the smartphone operating systems’ market within the United States, claiming more than half of the market in May 2020.
> ...
> Android still the one to catch
> Android, however, still holds the largest share of the United States smartphone operating systems’ market and has done for many year.
So this is about the smartphone operating systems, in the united states. Apple has “more than half of the market”, and Android has “the largest share”. How are both statements possibly true?
Market share /= number of devices.
Apple owns the "market", ie the money. Apple owners spend vastly more on their OS (via playstore). Android might be running on vastly more devices, but the people who matter, the rich people with money to spend on camera apps, spend that money via iPhones.
We live in a world where whales matter more than customers. The legions of android users who use their phones to make phonecalls, as internet browsers, and as navigational tools ... they don't matter as much as any single iPhone user who regularly drops a few hundred every month on eye candy iPhone backgrounds.
[1] https://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2020/01/in-2019...
Android users made a choice to prioritize their smartphone less in their financial lives by getting a cheaper device (except for the 5-6 HN commenters who got an Android because of a personal vendetta against the Apple App Store policies).
It stands to reason that the people who decided not to spend money on a smartphone also decide not to spend money on smartphone apps.
Sorry to burst your bubble of pretention but the highest end android phones are in another league of price and have been for a long time.
To be fair I won't even bother comparing the Zflip2 foldable because it's more of a proof of concept than something many people buy but it's price tag would make you blush. So, the numbers: the latest and greatest iPhone 12 max is $1549 CAD while Samsung's Note 20 Ultra 512GB is $2029.99 CAD.
A nerd get an Android, where a teenager will get an iPhone. It's simply a low information consumer buying an overpriced product.
If someone is willing to overpay for an inferior product, they likely will also impulse buy more often than someone who shops and researches phones..
“In the United States, Apple iOS devices — those running on Apple’s proprietary mobile operating system account for roughly 60 percent of mobile-device usage. Apple’s is a closed ecosystem; Apple does not license iOS to third-party mobile device manufacturers.
Another roughly 40 percent of mobile-device usage comes from devices that use Android, an open-source mobile operating system controlled by Google. Unlike iOS, Android is licensable, which means third-party mobile device manufacturers can use it as the operating system for their devices. All other mobile operating systems, combined account for less than one percent of mobile device usage in the United States.”
(Of course, whether that’s correct is a different question from whether that’s what the DoJ claims, but it doesn’t seem farfetched to me that it is correct, too)
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile-tablet/uni...
Mobile and Mobile/Tablet are pretty much the same, and Tablet only giving Apple a few percentage points advantage further (~65%).
No. That's NOT what the DOJ wants to argue. Yes, the complaint itself does refer to market share, but it doesn't specifically refer to "92 percent of the world's internet searches". In fact, the complaint refers to market share within the United States, since that's geographically relevant to the case. What happens elsewhere isn't. [1]
[1] https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/GOOGLEANTITRUST...
This is what the NYTimes wrote:
> The Justice Department, which is asking for a court injunction preventing Google from entering into deals like the one it made with Apple, argues that the arrangement has unfairly helped make Google, which handles 92 percent of the world’s internet searches, the center of consumers’ online lives.
92 percent links to a report by statcounter.com [2]. That's the NYTimes making a claim about Google's market share and linking to a source.
If you read the sentence even more carefully, you'll see the word "which" appear twice. "Which" grammatically denotes a non-defining clause from the perspective of the writer. It's information that you could remove without altering the core of the sentence: [3]
"The Justice Department argues that the arrangement has unfairly helped make Google the center of consumers’ online lives"
More importantly, "which" is gramatically used from the perspective of the writer to give a bit of non-essential background to the sentence. And so, what is absolutely NOT being said here, is that the DOJ claims that Google holds a 92 percent market share.
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/technology/apple-google-s... [3] https://www.grammarly.com/blog/which-vs-that/
>Over the years, Google has steadily increased its dominant position in general search services. In July 2007, Google estimated its general search services market share at 68 percent. By June 2013, Google estimated that its share in the United States had already increased to 77 percent on computers. By April 2018, Google estimated that its share was 79 percent on computers and 93.5 percent on mobile. More recently, Google has accounted for almost 90 percent of all general search engine queries in the United States, and almost 95 percent of queries on mobile devices. Recent share estimates are in Figures 7 and 8.
Is it harder to read with two non-defining clauses? That's something else.
The DOJ legislates largely based on US figures, but noting Google's global power is hard to ignore completely.
IOS devices are more expensive, so the ones I have actually get used (and most were bought secondhand so don’t contribute to market sales figures). Our household usage and search share is surely 99+% from Apple OSes, while the device share of devices bought new at retail might be only 40% Apple.
The justice department doesn't care who handles search traffic in Cambodia, Canada, or Taiwan. They are only interested in US based search traffic where iOS has 50%+ market share.
Be careful what you ask for. If you make such deals illegal, Apple will have to set Google as search engine for FREE thus benefiting Google.
As a non-murican it baffles me that US government will try to hurt its own successful companies in this fashion which smells of incompetence and political vendetta rather than genuine concern for the health of search ecosystem.
The interesting question then would be whether Apple would take somebody else's money and change the default search engine on their devices. Which might net them almost as much money, but might also irritate a lot of their users if the highest bidder isn't as good of a search engine.
I'd assume it's referring to both only US traffic and only mobile traffic.
Because if you make it worldwide or include desktops/laptops, it's laughable.
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-st...
1.) Google handles 92% of global search traffic
2.) extrapolate to the US (since it's likely the same, if not higher) : Google handles 92% of US search traffic
3.) Half of Google's US traffic comes from Apple devices (since Apple controls 60% of the smartphone market in the US).
I do see everyone running with those numbers as if they were fact though. That's the danger of using such made up numbers in the report: everyone else repeats them as if they were fact even when the report says they don't know.
iOS really dominates — I’d guess that half of the Android users get pushed by a salesman at a carrier store, who get spiffed by different companies. Many only buy a smartphone because they are unaware flip phones still exist!
> Nearly half of Google’s search traffic now comes from Apple devices, according to the Justice Department
> The Justice Department, which is asking for a court injunction preventing Google from entering into deals like the one it made with Apple, argues that the arrangement has unfairly helped make Google, which handles 92 percent of the world’s internet searches, the center of consumers’ online lives.
What? Worldwide, iOS market share is peanuts compared to Android. Depending on the report, the exact amount varies pretty widely, but nothing ever seems to report more than 18-ish percent worldwide. macOS is negligible. Meanwhile, Android’s market share is enormous.
Android devices alone—worldwide—could easily account for half of Google’s search traffic, especially when you consider countries like India. But the DOJ wants to argue that:
1. Google handles 92% of global search traffic
2. Half of Google’s traffic comes from Apple devices
If we believe that 92% figure, that places a generous upper limit of Google’s search traffic originating from Apple devices at about 20%, far short of “nearly half.”
Look, I hate the monopolistic nature of search just as much as the next person, but can we please double-check that our numbers actually make sense?