The Smartphone Wars: Tracking userbase growth
<p>I&#8217;ve put together a tool to visualize the smartphone market-share data <a href="http://www.comscore.com">comScore</a> makes available in its monthly press releases.  Readers can download both <a href="http://www.catb.org/esr/comscore/">the tool and the raw data</a> in order to check my work.  And the first new visualization is quite interesting:</p>
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<p><a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/usercounts-mar2011.png"><img src="http://esr.ibiblio.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/usercounts-mar2011.png" alt="" title="usercounts-mar2011" width="640" height="480" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-3241" /></a></p>
<p>This was derived in the obvious way; I simply multiplied the market-share percentages by comScore&#8217;s number for total smartphone users.  The result provides a different perspective from the <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3191">market-share visualization</a> I posted yesterday.  It is, I think, quite revealing.  </p>
<p>We can see that Android is on a qualitatively different growth path than any of the other smartphone platforms.  It&#8217;s not just that the slope is different, it&#8217;s that Android&#8217;s growth curve looks less perturbed by short-timescale events.  This is probably a consequence of the breadth of the Android product range &#8211; market success or failure is a summation of more product bets, which will tend to average.  I&#8217;m left wondering what happened in May 2010 when the slope increased.</p>
<p>Apple is the other platform that&#8217;s actually growing users.  I think, bearing in mind that ComScore reports three-month running averages, that we can actually see the effects of the iPhone 4 and 4V here; there are small slope increases at about the right places  in June 2010 and February 2011. Still, there&#8217;s not a lot of hope in this graph for anyone who wants to think Apple will catch up to Android.</p>
<p>I think this visualization increases the mystery around Apple&#8217;s market share trend being essentially flat for 18 months, because Apple has gained something like 5 million users in that time.  I can&#8217;t believe it&#8217;s just a fantastic numerological coincidence of market conditions, but I don&#8217;t know what it means.</p>
<p>My has RIM been having a bumpy ride.  This visualization makes its situation look less dire than I previously thought; evidently, RIM has been gaining users just a little faster than it&#8217;s been losing share. Still, the trend for them since September 2010 hasn&#8217;t been good.  The visualization also shows how Android and Apple have been sucking the oxygen out of RIM&#8217;s atmosphere, and that&#8217;s unlikely to change anytime soon.</p>
<p>Microsoft&#8217;s decline is clearer here than in the market-share plot.  What a helpless, screwed-up mess they look like these days!  Looks like Linux is doing them in after all, except in smaller cases than we expected and with ARM chips.</p>
<p>Interestingly, Palm is in the position I thought six months ago RIM might occupy &#8211; declining share but a very stable userbase. Perhaps I&#8217;ve underestimated their survival odds.</p>
