Nvidia latest to claim Android and iOS will be a repeat of the PC and Mac market
The Appside reports Nvidia’s VP of mobile content predicting the future of mobile hardware market-share:
Apple is fabulously successful and I’m sure will continue to be so, but I do think Android will, over time, really dominate the mobile market. It’s nothing to do with who’s better, it’s just you have thousands of companies producing these devices… I think it’s going to be a repeat of the PC/Mac market, with 80% Android and 20% iOS.
First, that really isn’t a repeat of the PC/Mac market, which has mostly been closer to 95:5. Even now, with Apple massively outpacing the PC market by some margin, its share of computers remains in single figures. But secondly, and most importantly, I find the argument that there has to be—or even that there will be—one dominant player in the mobile market without foundation. If we look back through the history of technology, and even examine the present, the PC/Mac market was an aberration. You don’t have people arguing that only one company will become dominant in TVs, cars, sound systems, and so on.
Additionally, we’re today able to enjoy a large amount of interoperability between different systems, largely thanks to the internet, and also through instant-messaging systems, social networks, and even the likes of SMS. Each hardware provider attempts to have its own lock-ins and ecosystems, but, increasingly, we have a mobile environment that can happily cater for and support a number of players.
I don’t doubt Android will retain the largest chunk of the market, although it does appear it will become increasingly fragmented—we may soon end up in a situation were Android is merely the underlying foundation for a number of systems that are, in a de-facto sense, individual entities. (Although I suspect most reporters will happily ignore this, in order to produce yet more link-bait headlines.) But iOS dropping to 20 per cent, or further? It’s possible, but I certainly don’t think we should be using the PC/Mac battles of the 1990s as evidence that it will. And Apple’s Q1 and Verizon’s Q4, where it was revealed more than half of Verizon’s sales were iPhones (CNET), shows that Apple can hold its own against the Android juggernaut, despite being the only company making iOS devices.
It’s Highlanderism all over again! There can be only one!
There might just be one, but it will be iOS. Trevett is imagining that platform dominance comes from a high number of hardware manufacturers, when in reality it comes from a high number of users and app developers.
I don’t see iOS becoming that dominant either. A major player, yes, but not in a Windows-style position.
What exactly qualifies Android to play the role of Windows in this fantasy scenario? Putting aside the foolishness of comparing the PC market to the smart phone market, what feature does Android possess, other than ubiquity, to compare to Windows to argue that Android can be leveraged to devastate Apple in market share? Microsoft’s Windows, regardless of what one thinks of its performance and features thru the 90’s, was an OS with a consistent interface that ran across dozens of different configurations of hardware and if you had sufficient RAM and HDD space, a program you used on a Compaq looked, ran and performed identically to the OS/program combo on an IBM or a Dell. An update to the Windows OS was an update that could be deployed office/company/country-wide, even globally. Compare this to the legions of Android based abandonware handsets that will never get an update.
Unless and until Android reaches a level of interface and performance consistency (never mind support or even updates past original purchase) , Androids market share alone will not make any developer the same amount of money as a lesser number of Apple products which not only get updates going back three years of hardware, but have a consistent OS across both the iPhone and the iPad. Androids cumulative market share will be of no service to Google or it’s partners as a monopoly capable of being wielded as Windows was/is on the PC. Except as a continuing delivery mechanism for ads.
@Darel Rex Finley
I think the mentioned “hardware dominance” is more referring to the percentage of a total hardware pool using any given OS, not manufacturer.
ie. Apple is a big manufacturer, yes they are producing (slightly) more handsets than Samsung Galaxy, but __iOS__ marketshare in the mobile industry is outnumbered 5-to-1 in terms of new activations overall when compared with Android.
Windows hasn’t had a good run on the mobile side of things… but as said above – its consistent and it just needs to maintain that compatibility. Last I heard, Windows 8 will be also compatible across ARM architectures (most phones and tablets) as well as PC/Laptops
As much as I love the openness of Android, or the closed-control of iOS, if a corporation is presented with the possibility to spend $100 more to upgrade every phone/tablet to the same operating system as 95% of their computers (likely halving costs of extra software development, and support) it will be a no-brainer.
I think the mobile market is still too young, to draw any such black-and-white opinion… and nVidia’s press should really be taken with a grain of salt while they are trying to sound confident regarding stacking a LOT of their revenue in fixing a very inefficient mobile chip for last-gen Androids