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Surprise: Google Reveals iOS Market Share Is 65% to 230% Bigger Than We Thought

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In the U.S., phones based on Google's Android and Apple's iOS mobile operating systems typically share the market relatively evenly. Globally, however, the percentage looks much more like somewhere between 80% to almost 90% Android, leading many to conclude that the mobile platform war is pretty much Windows versus MacOS, part two.

Or so virtually all sales statistics have led us to believe.

Apple

Google VP Dave Burke, however, provided insight yesterday that Google may actually have less than 66% global market share. And he did so right on Google's own blog. The key difference? Sales numbers versus actual usage numbers. And, not counting open source Android devices.

Burke posted that Google was celebrating a major milestone:

"There are now 2 billion monthly active Android devices globally," he wrote. "This is an extraordinarily humbling milestone — and it’s the largest reach of any computing platform of its kind."

That is an amazing number, and it is extremely impressive.

Just a bit less amazing but also impressive is that over a year ago, Apple announced that there were more than one billion iOS devices in active use. Since that announcement in January 2016, Apple has sold more than 260 million iPhones alone, according to publicly-released sales figures. (Note: iPads also run iOS, and would bolster that number additionally.)

Add the two billion Android devices Google announced today with the one billion iOS devices Apple announced 15 months ago -- even ignoring the almost 300 million more iOS devices Apple has sold since then -- and Apple has a third of the mobile devices running either stock Android or iOS in operation today.

If generally-accepted sales statistics suggest 10 to 20% iOS market share in global devices sold, these activity statistics suggest 33% global market share in devices used.

Of course, this ignores Android-based devices that Burke is not talking about: perhaps 800 million working Android devices that Google does not see, because they are AOSP devices (open source Android) and they do not phone home to Google. (Only .4% of new smartphones globally run any other operating system.)

And that means that iOS is from 65% to 230% bigger, in comparison to devices running Google's Android, than anyone looking solely at sales numbers over the past few years -- showing between 10% and 20% market share -- might be led to believe. Add the 300 million new iOS devices that Apple didn't account for, and the numbers would grow even higher.

Why the discrepancy?

Android smartphone

Samsung

One reason, potentially, is that iOS hardware tends to be higher quality, on average, than Android. Apple makes iPhones to a very high standard, and while many manufacturers make premium Android phones to a similar or perhaps even higher level of quality, there are plenty of cheap Android phones, especially for emerging markets, than tend to drag down the average.

This could lead to iPhones lasting longer than Android devices, on average. And those aren't just ancient devices running out-of-date software. 80% of Apple's mobile devices are running the latest or very recent versions of iOS.

Google's Android, clearly, is still the dominant global operating system by number of devices. And with open source Android variants, it has massive market share. But Apple's iOS market share in terms of actual devices in use is a lot bigger than many people may have believed.

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