[Technology] Apple's Superpower Continues To Dominate Android

[lioneatszebra]

Apple's Superpower Continues To Dominate Android
from Forbes

Apple’s latest figures show that sixty-six percent of devices compatible with iOS 9 are running the latest major version of the software. Once more Apple has shown its superpower in the ability to keep its mobile platform fresh, while Google’s Android OS continues to be hampered by strategic decisions made many years ago.

The iOS numbers are “as measured by the App Store on November 2, 2015″ which leaves Apple some wiggle room in terms of measurement. It stands opposite the tighter definition of Android versions used by Google for its Android developer dashboard (“This data reflects devices running the latest Google Play Store app, which is compatible with Android 2.2 and higher. Each snapshot of data represents all the devices that visited the Google Play Store in the prior 7 days”).

Independent analysis from Mixpanel shows that iOS 9 adoption is closer to seventy-five percent. Mixpanel’s numbers come from data collected by the analytics it provides to developers to understand engagement in their applications. As part of this process Mixpanel can do top-down analysis on this data, in this case looking at the installed iOS 9 base.

No matter where you take the numbers, the broad consensus is a simple one. The speed of adoption of iOS 9 is huge. After seven weeks the uptake on the latest vision of Apple’s mobile platform dominates its marketplace. Stacked up against the slow update of Lollipop (just twenty-three and a half percent nearly a year after its release), Android’s inability to offer timely updates to the firmware or patch newly visible security issues is becoming more visible to the public.

As more vulnerabilities and issues are found in both mobile operating systems, it is Apple that retains the ability to quickly deal with issues through an OS update. Google can patch up some areas, notably in any single application or issue in the Google Play services code, but anything lower in the stack that requires an over-the-air update is going to be caught up in the politics of the Android ecosystem and the uneasy relationship between consumers, carriers, manufacturers and Google.

While Google can control the updates rolling out to the Nexus devices and manufacturers using the Android One program, its hands are tied in respect to manufacturers such as HTC and Samsung. While other software vendors in the past have been able to deal with updates at scale over multiple vendors and SKUs (notably the patches supplied by Microsoft over the years for Windows), Google instead offered more autonomy to manufacturers over the software to grow market share quickly.

The problems Android s now going through in the inability to roll out changes stem from that initial decision to speed up the rollout of the software. There’s no doubt that Android has won the market share battle, but with record sales of iOS handsets, ninety-two percent of smartphone profits flowing to Apple and Android flagship sales dropping, it seems that the pursuit of market share is a hollow victory.