

Android 95.2% market share in South Korea - bane
http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/jm2ut/android_952_market_share_in_south_korea/

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sjwright
I suspect that a major cause for people to ditch their iPhones will be to do
with availability of Korean-translated and Korean-localized apps.

Now that Android has been given a comfortable lead, local developers won't
even bother writing or porting local apps for iOS.

Language and cultural siloing is the reason non-English-Western markets can be
so dramatically different to English-Western. If anyone wonders why Samsung is
investing so much energy into Bada, it's because they want to try and win the
OS race for _themselves_ , and there's still few Asian markets where the
opportunity still exists.

~~~
Steko
iOS looks fine for korean mindshare:

[http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=android%2Ciphone...](http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=android%2Ciphone&geo=KR&date=1%2F2009%2032m&cmpt=q)

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katovatzschyn
Were I to infer anything from that data, it would be that "mindshare" is not a
significant metric. 95% market share, and near parity in "mindshare?" That
smacks of irrelevancy to me.

~~~
Steko
My point with the data is that the claim of 95% market share is probably not
accurate.

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Tsagadai
I seriously doubt the accuracy of these stats. South Korea's web services are
largely insular and just for South Korea. It well known that foreign websites
have much smaller market shares of pageviews and users than domestic Korean
sites. There is a Korean clone for almost every major website presently
available and they are usually made by existing, large Korean companies with
advertising and media budgets to get numbers away from foreign competitors.
Given the deliberately isolationist nature of so many internet companies here,
you cannot get accurate stats for usage unless you have their stats.

I know this is anecdotal but the majority of people I see on the bus have
iPhones. iPads are probably on par with Android tablets though. iPhones are
huge here. Almost everyone has or wants a smartphone which usually means an
iPhone mainly due to the perception of Apple as a luxury brand and luxury
brands being so overwhelmingly popular.

~~~
nextparadigms
The market share doesn't seem to be for total user base, but for new sales. So
even if there is a user base of 40% iPhones there, it's declining fast and
trending towards 5%, because the sales for last month show 5% iPhones sold and
95% Android phones sold.

~~~
eftpotrm
If that's for sales, would it not be quite predictable that iPhone sales are
dropping when a new model is anticipated in the next few months?

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dave1010uk
PPK (of QuirksMode) breaks down these StatCounter mobile browser share stats
and explains them in his blog post here:
[http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2011/08/mobile_brows...](http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2011/08/mobile_browser_16.html)

Also of note, this month Android jumped past Nokia into 3rd place globally and
Opera is close to losing its lead.

What's strange is that last month Nokia's Symbian had the largest share by OS
globally.

PPK also has some country-specific breakdowns for Q2 of this year here:
[http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2011/08/q2_2011_mobi...](http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2011/08/q2_2011_mobile_1.html)
that shows that in the UK (where I am), BlackBerry is in the lead.

When developing mobile apps or sites that have a global market, it's important
to realize how varied the mobile OS and browser landscape is.

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cageface
What's more interesting is that, at least according to that graph, iOS market
share has gone from 40% down to next to nothing in less than a year.

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InclinedPlane
That's likely the market growing and diluting iOS' market share.

~~~
Steko
Or noise in the data. Like if Samsung has a standard app or widget that pings
a statcounter site every 15 minutes.

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chaz
The original source: [http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-KR-
monthly-201007-20110...](http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-KR-
monthly-201007-201107)

~~~
eddieplan9
The result for China is also very interesting:

[http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-CN-
monthly-201007-20110...](http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-CN-
monthly-201007-201107)

I bet the [unknown] is some home-grown android derivative.

~~~
jcampbell1
The unknown in China is UC Browser, which is a proxied browser where the
rendering is on the server side. <http://www.ucweb.com/> Generally used as a
replacement for symbian.

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ljf
Slightly less dramatic stat here, but still reckons it's 70% Android in terms
of sales in the most recent months:
[http://thenextweb.com/google/2011/06/22/android-
powers-70-of...](http://thenextweb.com/google/2011/06/22/android-powers-70-of-
south-korean-smartphones-as-sales-top-10-million/)

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bignoggins
I was just in Seoul a few months ago and I saw about equal numbers of iPhones
vs Androids. And as a mobile developer I pay extra attention to these type of
things =)

The percentage of people who even have smartphones in SK seems far higher than
the US. It's difficult to find anyone without an iphone or android.

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rmc
Anyone got an authoratative link as opposed to a link to a reddit thread which
links to an imgur.com screenshot of this supposed results?

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mathattack
This highlights how much iPhone is tied to local carriers. South Korea is a
market leader in mobile technology. Making it there means a lot in terms of
the global marketplace. (Then again, I used to say the same thing about
Japan.)

~~~
rjd
No it reflects national pride.

Samsung and LG are both Korean, and I bet that 95% figure is mostly those two
companies.

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billpaetzke
There is no official Apple retail store in South Korea--only resellers. This
may be part of the reason, too.

~~~
minikomi
How much of an effort has Apple directed at marketing to South Koreans? In
Japan, most of the marketing push came not from Apple but from the official
carrier - Softbank.

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rodion_89
For a lot of people I know, the lack of marketing on the Android front is why
they switched from Softbank to AU. These friends of mine are not technically
oriented so marketing plays a big factor in term of what they know about
phones. On the other hand AU is really upping their game.

~~~
minikomi
Yep.. a guy in my office is helping AU get free wireless points for their
users into stores (cafe's, bars etc.) for 8万 a pop.. pretty sweet little side
biz.

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pointyhat
That's internet-browsing phones share.

I reckon there's still two orders of magnitude more Nokia Series 40 handsets
out there in the wild. Especially in places like China.

Still in the UK, there's a surprising number of Series 40 handsets floating
around on the streets, even helf by owners of HTC's and iPhones "incase they
go wrong".

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mikerhoads
What is even more impressive is that there are only a few active cell phones
in North Korea that aren't Android powered.

