The Android Invasion

Google CEO announced in talks to the press that Android just reaqched the milestone of 200,000 activations per day

which surpasses the iphone daily activation rates bragged by Apple. But what does this mean?

Lets put this in perspective. That is 6 million devices per month or 18 million devices per quarter. Nokia is

currently at about 80 million devices per quarter.But market share wise Apple has about 300 to 400 million device customers while Nokia has about 1 billion device customers. The key will bethe Market changes that are happening now and in the 4th quarter of 2010 and the feature set of upcoming Android 3.0(Gingerbread).

Let me explain. To decrease someone’s market share the activiation rates have to at some point double per quarter.

Other-wise the increase is just eating away a few percentage points of the full number of devices in consumer hands.

Out another way if we reach 400,000 Android Device Activations daily activiations before Jan 1st 2011 that is enough

in one year to decarese Apple’s market share by half and Nokia’s by about 25%.

That is a strong confirmation that the often-strange way of having OHA partners work on a valued-closed-behind-the-scenes

next android release trunk source at break-neck speeds along with Google Engineers is working as an effective way to

put new features in hands of Hardware OEMs at a fast iterations required for the consumer smartphone sector.

But, this only half the story as both hardware OEMs and software OEMs(that are members of OHA) have also made some

critical iterations. We have improvements of the MediaCore(OpenCore) at a rapid pace. We also have at the same

time SoC OEMs who are members of OHA making it possible to obtain their low cost SoC solutions and build a

1 GHZ $100-priced android device. In the next 6 months you will see another iteration dropping that consumer

price to $50 for an Android 1 GHZ device.

Google CEO announced in talks to the press that Android just reaqched the milestone of 200,000 activations per day which surpasses the iphone daily activation rates bragged by Apple. But what does this mean?
Lets put this in perspective. That is 6 million devices per month or 18 million devices per quarter. Nokia iscurrently at about 80 million devices per quarter.
But market share wise Apple has about 300 to 400 million device customers while Nokia has about 1 billion devicecustomers. The key will bethe Market changes that are happening now and in the 4th quarter of 2010 and the feature set of upcoming Android 3.0(Gingerbread).
Let me explain. To decrease someone’s market share the activiation rates have to at some point double per quarter.Other-wise the increase is just eating away a few percentage points of the full number of devices in consumer hands.Out another way if we reach 400,000 Android Device Activations daily activiations before Jan 1st 2011 that is enoughin one year to decarese Apple’s market share by half and Nokia’s by about 25%.
That is a strong confirmation that the often-strange way of having OHA partners work on a valued-closed-behind-the-scenesnext android release trunk source at break-neck speeds along with Google Engineers is working as an effective way toput new features in hands of Hardware OEMs at a fast iterations required for the consumer smartphone sector. But, this only half the story as both hardware OEMs and software OEMs(that are members of OHA) have also made somecritical iterations. We have improvements of the MediaCore(OpenCore) at a rapid pace. We also have at the sametime SoC OEMs who are members of OHA making it possible to obtain their low cost SoC solutions and build a1 GHZ $100-priced android device. In the next 6 months you will see another iteration dropping that consumerprice to $50 for an Android 1 GHZ device.

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60,000 vs 90,000

Tim Bray  in his first Advocate post stated a daily sales figure of 60,000 versus iPhone’s daily 90,000 unit sales figure. Now, remember Apple has had 3 years to get to that 90,000 units per day figure.  But, Android has reached 60,000 per day figure in less than 2 years. See why Apple is is scared yet?

A large part of that has been due the hard work of Verizon and Motorola. We as Nadrid Developers shoudl be prepared when it becomes 90,000 Android Devices sold per day later this year.

Android iPhone Coolness

Most of you when encountering my Make Android Apps look Like iPhone Apps posts understood that it was not literal in that I did not mean make an Android App look like iPhone  but meant in polishing the UI of the Android Application look and feel to implement a greater user experience. There is a large difference between iPhone and Android and even the now Open Symbian OS.

In the Steve Jobs world the iPhone Application Developer only gets to access UI APIs that Steve Jobs wants them to access and use and only give users the UI Application experience that Steve Jobs believes the user should have.

You will never see an iPhone Application Developer deliver a better Application UI experience to the user because Steve Jobs prevents that action. Not only has Android moved away form straight-jacketing Application Developers in such a manner even Open Symbian OS has moved towards giving Application Developers full reign in coming up with a new Application UI experience.

Thus, if I am spending too much comparing Android  Application UIs to iPhone Application UIs this week there are those reasons above and the fact that the last time a Mobile OS market share increased by 5% in one quarter was when iPhone OS was first released in 2007. My point is that Google and OHA gave us, the Mobile Application Developers, the freedom to come up with new Mobile Application UI user experiences beyond what they came up with.

But to get that new Android Application UI  user experience w2e have to polish our Android Applications UI user experience first.

Make Android apps look like Iphone Apps Series

Yes, I am writing a series of articles on Android Aesthetics or in common words make android apps look like iphone apps. I will be putting them up shortly via Google’s Knol service, link to my knols i son the right hand side of this blog.

Android UI vs iPhone UI

So why am I trashing my own app UI design? Well, with the ad space of 100px I get this:

As you can see the ad space size does not play well as far as taking up too much space. But there are some other concerns.

If you view the iPhone demo:

..you see applications with bulky top and bottom menus. nOw look at the Nexus One gallery application(no its not in the emulator yet):

..notice that you have some floating menus. That seems the standard-in-quotes that visually Google and OHA seem to be pushing towards as far as visual lok of the application.

Thus I change the top most container from relative layout to frame layout to enable me to float a small menu. I eliminate the status bar and the ad space as I can have the free version just organize by file name tags and the premium version organize by file names and picture object detection.

Google Mobile Revolution

Mobile is changing. I first made a entry into mobile in 2001 starting work at a startup and later on eneded contributing to a user interface library called SynClastUI for MIDP J2ME. Back than it was a real pain to do any mobile development and mobile fragmentation among mobile platforms was in full swing.  I imagine that the Android Goolge IO videos will be up here after a few days.

What Google has introduced is a new way to do mobile development. Not just on Android but also on Apple iPhone and Symbian and or any Webkit enabled mobile platform. On Android we can develop using Java, Java and Native, Java and web through webview, and web. But now we have on any webkit enabled device web and html5. While you will not expect to see intensive 3d games or other heavy computational applications using web you will see a whole range of new applications that can run only any webkit enabled device.

But more importantly it levels the playing field for web developers to make a transition to mobile applications without having to learn heavy duty mobile programming. Google is becoming the new mobile standards player and that is without a JCP membership or bowing down to Microsoft or other entrenched stakeholders within the Mobile Industry. Mobile is now exciting again.