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Android Becomes Top Mobile Operating System in U.S., No. 2 Worldwide (readwriteweb.com)
41 points by morisy on Nov 1, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 8 comments



I think it's important to note this report only covers "smartphones", not all mobile devices.

But a bigger question is: So what?

Wouldn't you say that in the age of the App Store, "revenue per user" seems a much more important statistic than "units shipped"?

Even with Android, it doesn't seem the carriers are evolving their business model much. Apple's the only one seriously carving out new territory in its customers' wallets (and raking in cash because of it).


Does anyone know where that would place it in terms of all operating systems? It seems like the number of mobile and non-mobile devices should be converging pretty quickly (for consumers, at least).


The article says there were 20 million Android devices sold in the US in Q3.

This article: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Desktops-and-Notebooks/Apple-iPad-T... says that in Q3 Apple sold 2 million computers in the US which was 10.6% of the total. So that means there were about 16 million Windows computers sold.

However, that PC number is just "consumer" sales and businesses buy more computers than consumers. Still though, Android is getting close already.


I agree although I would say the trend would still show Microsoft leading the bunch. This statistic would be very interesting indeed though. Perhaps even desktop operating system versus mobile operating system.


And this is why it is critically important for there to be a way to have an X server on Android so that we can use Android devices to serve up remote display/input sessions, i.e., access client applications running on virtually any OS and any hardware.


At least we have vnc.


It will be interesting to see if the same thing holds this time next year with an iPhone on Verizon.


It will be interesting to see if the same thing holds this time next year with Windows Phone 7 on the same phones as Android.




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