Android vs. iOS

You wouldn’t be surprised to know that Apple still takes the majority share of profits within the smartphone industry nor would it be surprising that Apple has a rapidly growing dependence on the iPhone (with 5% of Apple’s total revenue in 2008 coming from the iPhone and jumping up to 53% in 2013!) [Source: Statista]

We’ve all heard that for the first time in 2013 there were over one billion smartphone shipments, of which Android dominated the market.

But did you think that the price gap between iOS and Android is widening, even with Apple’s price drop of the iPhone?

Similarly, Apple’s market share of tablet shipments has decreased by 20% in 2 years whilst Samsung, Asus, Lenovo and others are increasing. On a side note, Amazon’s tablet market share is decreasing as well, but not as drastically, they only saw a decrease of less than 10%.

With the ever growing battle between Apple and Samsung, and similarly iOS and Android, these statistics show that Apple is slowly but surely losing its foothold in the market it used to dominate in.

If we stop to look back at Apple’s growth, we can see that its success shot up when it released the first iPhone in 2007. More recently, it has predominantly been focussing on the iPhone and hasn’t released any new products. Remember the days of constantly new iPods popping up here there and everywhere? Unfortunately, this is where it has all gone wrong for Apple. We can see its decreasing revenue and profit since 2011 in the image below.

Having said that, this could just be another one of Apple’s tricks; it has been long-rumoured that Apple is to release an iWatch or even an Apple television!

So even though statistics show that iPhones are in the lead against Samsung and that Apple continue to have the lion’s share of profits in the smartphone industry. As a company, they seem to be taking steps back instead of racing ahead as expected.