Holiday Activations: Did iOS Just Beat Android?

Despite what seems like never ending boasting from Frandroids that Android is activating some 770,000 new devices daily, it appears that Apple's iOS may have nonetheless just beaten it when it came to the recent Christmas holiday period.

As Philip De Elmer-DeWitt pointed out, it's all basically guess work at this point, so we'll just have to wait until Apple announces its next quarterly results to know for sure, but it could be a period that some think could also be the biggest corporate blow-out in history, so anything is possible!

Based on information from Flurry Analytics, Mr. DeWitt also noted that:

• A week earlier, Rubin had tweeted that daily activations of Android devices now exceed 700,000.
• If we assume at least 700,000 Android devices were activated on Christmas Eve, the number activated on Christmas Day could not exceed 3 million.
• If we can trust Flurry's and Rubin's numbers, that suggests at least 3.8 million iOS devices were activated on Dec. 25.
• Given that Android phones outsold iPhones by 2:1 worldwide in the second quarter of 2011 and more than 3:1 in the third quarter, it's likely that if Apple did beat Android in the Christmas bake-off by nearly 800,000 units, sales of the iPad and iPod touch probably accounted for the difference.

In other words, unless Apple blows it, it should have beaten Android soundly over the holiday period by almost one million units! That's a huge increase that should help to put a big dent in Android's seemingly unstoppable success. It won't kill it, of course, but it could mean that Android is going to have to fight, and fight a lot harder to keep iOS at bay in the near and long term.

If the above isn't bad enough news for Android, well it's even worse on patent war front which could find Android in even deeper water, and especially now that Apple was also just awarded another major multi-touch patent, which AppleInsider described this way:

"Apple won a core multitouch patent regarding oscillating signals that was alluded to when Steve Jobs first announced the original iPhone in 2007, and adds to the company's already formidable legal arsenal."

When it comes to the on going patent wars, Google's Eric Schmidt can cry foul, and how Apple limit's competition, all he wants, but as Fosspatent's Florian Mueller pointed out:

"If Mr. Schmidt wanted to imply that Apple restricts competition, he will soon get a 400-page statement of objections against Google's allegedly anticompetitive conduct from the European Commission's directorate-general for competition enforcement."

Florian Mueller has also stated that when it comes to Google:

"..... I have repeatedly criticized Google's attitude toward other companies' intellectual property (most recently in quotes I provided to the Christmas Eve edition of The Telegraph)...."

In conclusion, I don't know if Apple did indeed surpassed Google over the Christmas holiday period in activations or not, but, if it did 'smoke Android', then it could be a major turning point in the battle for the hearts and minds of customers looking for a future smartphone!




And that's my 2 cents 4 this dark, forbidding Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Chart via: CNN/Fortune