The battle between two High-Tech giants Google and Apple is rather acute at the mobile platform level. Both feel stronger than ever to compete for their share of the mobile market niches. They often fight with words and favorable stats – for the shareholders’ good, of course.
iPhone4 presentation, we may say, included certain subplots.
1) iBooks vs Amazon Kindle. Apple boasts 5 million books sold, 2.5 per iPad during the first 8 weeks of the iPad circulation. They are also proud of selling 2 million iPads in 8 weeks, while Amazon Kindle tried to silence the fact of sales as low as 3 million in 2 years.
2) How do 1 billion dollars paid to Apple App Store software developers sound to you compared to Android Marketplace’s 24-hour return policy, especially for games? Sounds like Android is losing were Apple I counting profits, together with the app store developers, of course.
3) Apple is taking the lead in other “who would think that” markets. FaceTime may as well become the new standard for video calls. As far as games are concerned, you know, I don’t even want to start a number ramble here. Enough to say that iPhone & iPad have almost five times more game titles vs. Nintendo DS and Sony PSP combined and has been growing rapidly in revenue.
4) While iOS enjoys overwhelming adoration on the side of its new and old fans, Android is catching up.
5) App developers see much more long-term potential for Android than iOS due to its openness.
– Android has the flexibility of Linux;
– Android is designed for low-end devices;
– Android already has a ton of great functionality specific to consumer devices, including GPS, touch screen, media playing, file storage, and Internet access.
6) Enterprise developers tend to show a deeper interest in RIM/BlackBery and WP7 than smaller development companies, which is also no surprise given their prior investments in BlackBerry and Microsoft’s infrastructure, but this is a completely different story.
