“Is Apple’s dominance of Mobile Development on the Wane?”

It appears to be an old editorial trick, the classic alarmist headline, because the article itself goes on to answer in the negative:

Apple is the logical choice for mobile development today

Where is market share going? The best bet is still targeting the Apple iPhone

This, providing further evidence for my calling BS on “Android Dominance” post last month.

I completely agree with author, Todd Warren, when he says “there are so many things wrong with developing on iPhone.”  From a purely technical standpoint, developing for Android (or perhaps even, cough, Windows Phone) is a much more pleasant experience. However, from a business standpoint, the cold hard fact is: one can completely ignore Android, Samsung, and Windows Phone without consequence. Again, quoting the Forbes story:

As the success of Instagram shows, the iPhone market is big enough to bootstrap an application to millions of users.

I would take this a step further and say that not only is Apple iOS the logical choice for “mobile development” but that iOS is the choice for all future development, other than niche enterprise apps. In other words, the whole term “mobile development” as an exception is itself an archaic model. Non-mobile is now the exception.

As I kept hearing more and more about  ”Android’s Dominance” I was seeing quite the opposite in the real-world. I operate and assist clients with a number of sites and, as a result, I have visibility into tracking data for many sites. What that information showed, in spot samples, was overwhelming iOS dominance and, in particular, iPhone dominance. It was glaring. Something didn’t add up.

I was also seeing a staggering shift away from desktop/laptop computers (Windows and Mac) to mobile devices, particularly over the past six months.

So I decided to look at the data more closely to see if I could find any indications of this supposed “Android Dominance” and to see how real this apparent shift to mobile is.

Below I present two info-graphics. Both are ”how people accessed the web.” The first is from early 2010 and the other is basically now, very current data (the first 10 weeks or so of 2012).

How People Access The Web 2010 - © Copyright telEvolution, Inc.

How People Access The Web 2012 - © Copyright telEvolution, Inc.

Wow!

I first put together the 2012 chart. Once I had that in hand, in this visual form, I found myself compelled to look back to how much things had changed. So I put together the 2010 chart, thinking 2010 is not that long ago. The iPad was out at that time. iPhone had been out for two years.

To say I was surprised by the shift from 2010 to 2012 would be a colossal understatement.

In terms of the 2012 picture, when you see it this way, the so-called dominance of Android is put in more realistic perspective. Also obvious is the Android fragmentation.

At the same time it shows, rather dramatically, just how dominant Apple is in the overall mobile space and, in particular, iPhone. That iPhone pie slice in the 2012 info-graphic is just staggering, visually. Almost as dramatic, visually, is the fragmentation of the Android segment. And that 42% figure is not just 42% of iOS but actually 42% of the entire mobile space! Nothing else comes even close to that dominance. People may well be buying Android devices, but they are clearly using their iPhones.

If you’re wondering, the 0.3% “All Other” segment is things like game consoles, Playstation, Wii, Google TV, connected TVs etc. The only reason that even gets a label is because I was surprised how small that segment was. People watch Netflix on those boxes, but they apparently don’t use them to surf the web very much.

It’s also kind of interesting, but probably not all that meaningful, that the Mac pie stayed about the same size overall between 2010 and 2012, about 7%-8% of the total. The dramatic desktop decrease is in the Windows segment, dropping from about 87% of all accesses in 2010 to just 38% in 2012.

Another side note is how, even in the much larger 2012 mobile pie, Blackberry, Nokia, and Windows Phone, which may have actually grown in terms of raw numbers over this period, are still so visually insignificant that they don’t even get a label in the chart.

Far beyond the real Android story, Google has to be worried even more about the decline in the desktop pie, given that according to their own SEC filings, 96% of their revenue comes from web browser clicks – and people aren’t clicking those ads on their mobile devices. Google’s entire revenue model falls apart on mobile and so far, they’ve had no answer for that. Perhaps this is one reason they are shifting gears so much toward Google+ which seems to me to be chasing a 2002 dream.

I’ll stand by this dataset as a good representation of the net at large, although it is slanted toward the English speaking net. This is the aggregate of a number of popular and general sites. If you look at one focused niche site, it might vary a bit from the above, depending on how narrow the site is, but if you look at enough varied sites, I’m certain you’ll find something that looks a lot like the above.

The take-away for me is that not only are we headed into a mobile future, but we are headed, for better or worse, into an Apple future, and we better get used to it. If you take the Mac and iOS combined, Apple now owns 45% of the surfing experience, already surpassing Microsoft Windows at 38% – and it’s only getting worse for Windows, as iPad sales continue to steamroll PCs. This “Android Dominance” meme is utter fiction and wishful thinking. Windows Phone? Get real. Unless you’re fine playing in a niche space, if you’re building a product or service and it isn’t designed with mobile first, it’s time to re-think it – throw out your plans and start over. I’m dead serious. What’s more, if it doesn’t thrive in an Apple-dominated mobile ecosystem, it’s also time to go back to the drawing board.

Meta: If you use these graphics, please give credit.

I’ve already seen a number of sites listing some of the gadgets at the expo. In my usual contrary style, let me point out a few that some people are all excited about but that I see as dead ends:

• Flash Drives.
  Really? This is cool? At $100 or more? I don’t get it.
• Scosche myTrek
  Isn’t this just a $130 $3 pedometer? I know, it’s not really, but still.
• TV Remote app/gadgets
  This sounds so cool, but think about it. The iPhone makes a terrible remote because it has no tactile feedback. For a small number of functions, it might be possible to have a simple gesture based UI, but I think in real life this is nowhere near as cool as it seems at first glance.

I did buy the Blue Yeti Pro USB and analog XLR microphone ($199 show price), despite some mixed reviews on Amazon. Hopefully it will meet my expectations for a home studio mic that I can also take with me and use with my Macbook Pro.

UPDATE: After struggling for quite a while, reading about and trying all sorts of things to fix the problems, I couldn’t get the Yeti Pro to work properly. I couldn’t get it to work AT ALL in analog mode. Not wanting to mess around with it anymore, I have been trying to return it and get my money back and Blue has been absolutely horrendous to work with and refusing to refund my money. DO NOT DEAL WITH THESE PEOPLE.

And I love the Discovery Bay Atari Arcade for iPad ($59.95) with the “Atari’s Greatest Hits” app. But be advised, the games are $0.99 each or $9.99 for all 99 available old-school Atari arcade games.

Another interesting piece of hardware is the D1 DAC (digital to audio converter) from Audioengine. I have a Mac Mini that is dedicated to my living room TV entertainment setup but at $169 I need to do a bit more research to see if the improvement in sound quality is really that dramatic. It is a really solid and attractive bit of hardware though.

There was a lot of other stuff at Macworld | iWorld like navigation, home automation, a nice portable projector from Epson ($800) and a whole bunch of music production apps and hardware – oh, and a bazillion cases, screen protectors, and other such, of course

I’m going, of course. I’ll report here if anything grabs me.

Now that it’s official, I guess we will finally get to find out what the ultimate impact will be.

While AT&T is the carrier we all love to hate, the assumption that everything will be better on Verizon may be overblown.  If we can believe anything, Verizon users should experience fewer dropped calls than AT&T users do, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area and the New York area.

One of the biggest negatives with Verizon to keep in mind is that you won’t be able to surf the net over 3G while talking on the phone at the same time – that’s only possible on AT&T’s network. I’m so used to this now, that this capability would be hard to live without.

It has also been reported that AT&T’s 3G network is faster, but there are those on the other side of that argument too. If there is a difference I suspect it’s marginal in real life and probably varies a lot case-by-case.

Of course  we all know the limitation of international use due to CDMA vs. GSM and SIM cards – but for many U.S. users, who don’t travel internationally, this is a non-issue – and others say they’ll just keep a cheap GSM phone and use pre-paid SIM cards for international use.

Another question is of course whether this will mean a large influx of new iPhone users, thus eating into the Droid market, or will Verizon iPhone customers be mostly switchers from AT&T that already had an iPhone.

Regardless, having the iPhone available on more carriers is a good thing, no matter how you look at it (maybe unless you’re AT&T). Competition and more choices will be nice for customers – maybe AT&T will finally resolve some of their network troubles – or maybe not.

The biggest problem is your battery.  Once you run Skype, it will keep running, and sucking up your battery.  Instead of 5-6 hours of usage on my 3G S, with Skype in the background, I was getting more like 2-3 hours.  As Stuart notes, the only way to stop it is manually from the iOS 4 multitasking (double-click) feature.

Skype should have a way to turn on/off multitasking from within the app itself. And as Stuart notes, when it is running in the background, you get barraged with notifications for everything and you have no controls over those notifications, short of quitting the Skype app from the multitasking bar.

The short of it is, if you start the Skype app, you probably want to double-click to kill it so it doesn’t kill your iPhone’s battery.

One could say this is a problem for the future, but I know people personally that are ready for the computerless, iPad-only world today – they can do everything they want to do on their iPad.  In fact, that’s exactly what they do. The laptop or desktop gathers dust, until they need to sync something or perform an update to the iPad.  In practice, these folks usually also have an iPhone or iPod for which they also must use the “real computer” to sync.

The only app they run on the computer is iTunes. Yet they still must suffer all the babysitting and housekeeping that goes with keeping a full Mac or PC functioning: patches, drivers, viruses, malware, system updates etc. – all just to run iTunes. Their $1,000 PC has become nothing more than a “syncing station.”

This is also a show-stopper for recommending the iPad as a replacement for a wearing-out PC – even for someone who is  a perfect candidate for it.  If they have to buy a new PC , and “maintain” it, with all the support and admin hassles that go with that, even if only in order to setup, sync, and update the iPad, then iPad is essentially a non starter as a “replacement” option.

Perhaps the most important thing to consider when buying an iPad is the USB cable. It must be connected to a PC to get iPad going and to sync/update. In the name of truth in advertising, Apple’s marketing should show the iPad connected by wire to a PC because that’s the reality a buyer is faced with.

Apple, this is not a problem for some distant future. That future is here already. Please tell me when I can suggest the iPad to these users so they can get off the Windows/Mac Admin treadmill.

I’m not sure if these wireless companies were in denial at the time, or whether they really believed Apple and their little toy iPhone was not much of a threat. I got the sense, they really believed it.  And I have to admit, I was guilty of a little underestimation of the iPhone’s potential at the time myself – that changed pretty fast for me (see this post, or this, or this).

I wonder if now, the tables have turned, and is it now Apple who is underestimating Verizon and Motorola’s new Droid that was announced today?

In my experience so far with Android-based phones, they are a lot more like the pre-iPhone “smartphones” than they are like iPhone – I call them DIY phones. They are more clunky to use, less intuitive, and much less consistent between apps.  Apple rules with an iron fist and that has it’s problems, but it also means the user experience is more consistent, even when using third-party apps.

However, in the U.S. iPhone has the AT&T Albatross around its neck. Verizon has created the perception that their network is better. Certainly, iPhone users know the AT&T data network is bad, bad, bad (and the voice calling ain’t a whole lot better).

Time will tell how this plays out of course, but my advice to Apple is don’t be like those companies you leapfrogged just a few short years ago. Don’t underestimate your opponent.

Yeah.  You know why? Because the iPhone provides a user experience that doesn’t make it almost impossible to use the Internet in any useful way, unlike AT&Ts other “smartphone” products. AT&T counted on iPhone users having a data usage profile similar to users of these other devices with their garbage user interfaces – no wonder nobody uses any data network on those things.

With the iPhone, even non-tech gurus can easily find and use web content, email, Twitter, and other data services. And so they use it, and use it. John Donovan, the chief technology officer of AT&T told the New York Times: “Overnight we’re seeing a radical shift in how people are using their phones. There’s just no parallel for the demand.”

iPhone users are already angry at AT&T for charging so much and giving so little. AT&T whines about spending billions on data network upgrades, but let’s face it: The iPhone has been a absolute blessing for AT&T:

The average iPhone owner pays AT&T $2,000 during his two-year contract — roughly twice the amount of the average mobile phone customer.

Without the iPhone, what would they be selling? Now AT&T wants to throttle back iPhone users even more. I think that would drive a mass exodus and put tremendous pressure on Apple to open up the device to other carriers.

A lot of things are not perfect with the iPhone, to say the least. One example is the “phone” part of it. If you’re a person that really likes to use their mobile phone for, say, talking to people, you know, not typing, but with your voice, and listening to the other person with your ear, you might want to play with an iPhone a little before jumping in.

Besides that minor detail, here are a few other areas where iPhone users suffer:

• Incompatible (or limited) Bluetooth support
• No MMS (to be fixed in the future for newer phones at least)
• No Flash support in the browser, meaning many sites cannot be used from the iPhone
• No multitasking – it doesn’t support more than one application running at the same time

And of course one of the biggest practical limitations of the iPhone is being locked to a carrier, AT&T in the U.S. For many people, this means switching carriers and for all of us in the U.S., it means accepting AT&T coverage and performance, which for many people sucks.

And then there’s the whole battle of the App Store that triggered Arrington’s response and a firestorm across the net (among geeks that follow such things at least, but even carried somewhat by the mainstream media):

It seems that in more numbers than ever, consumers are speaking out against AT&T’s network problems and developers are complaining about Apple’s and AT&T’s inconsistent policies on which applications get approval.

- The Washington Post

Yes, as an iPhone user, we accept a lot of flaws with the phone and service. But guess what? Even with these flaws, the combination of iPhone device and Apple and AT&T service still kicks ass over everything else. Many people seem to think Apple iPhone users are too stupid to realize what they’re giving up. I disagree. While there may be users in that category, for many of us, we know what we’re giving up, but we’re willing to do it, because the alternatives are even worse, far worse in most cases. [I'm going to qualify this in a few specific ways. One is if you talk on the phone a lot (I don't) the iPhone limitations hit a lot harder and you'd probably prefer a different phone. Second, if you really, really, really need a hardware keyboard, for emotional or whatever reason, then don't even consider the iPhone.]

As an example of a user that has issues with the iPhone but isn’t going anywhere, consider Dave Rosenberg of cnet who writes a mostly scathing review, and then concludes with:

All that said, I’m going to stick with it for now. The interface, utility, and functional possibilities are just that good.

That pretty much sums it up. However, all this said, Apple still needs to use this episode as a reality check. The iPhone has a global marketshare of only 1.9 percent. The competition is heating up, big time. Apple has a bullseye on their back, with the entire industry setting their sights on displacing them. For the most part, this is Apple’s game to lose. Apple needs some humility here (not something Steve Jobs has ever been known for). They could be knocked off their pedestal if they go too far. For some, like Arrington (and Om Malik before him), they have already crossed that line. For many of us, we’re not blindly following Apple wherever they go, but weighing the options, and, for now at least, staying with the iPhone, but keeping an eye open to the alternatives.