Android Tops iPhone

Apple opinions are now taking a formal backseat to the market alternatives.  As of the first quarter of 2010 both the leading mobile operating system as well as the leading mobile browser are not owned by Apple.
 
Since 2008 Apple has put forth a hot contender in the mobile smartphone market with their iPhone product.  The iPhone, exclusively running Apple iOS (operating system) and Apple Safari mobile browser, has been a leader in the smartphone market. While Blackberry, the real leader at 42% of the smartphone marketshare, has continued to dominate the mobile smartphone space.  At that point Apple had around 25% of the market share followed by Microsoft Windows Mobile @ 15% and Google Android @ 9%.

Riding the coattails of the popularity of the iPhone as well as the success and dominance of their mobile Safari browser, Apple’s Steve Jobs attempted to wager that street cred for a very specific and influential business decision: the removal of the Flash plugin from the web while it is wildly more adopted and hold significantly more market share success than any competing interactive platform for the web. His very verbal and public disdain for the Flash plugin was backed by the fact that his market leading products were not going to support it.  Web designers and developers would have to implement the web only using tools recommended by Apple rather than expecting Apple to support plugins in their mobile Safari browser.

All of this now shows signs of impending change (maybe not for Apple but rather for it’s now dominant competition). As of June, Google Android has overtaken Apple iPhone in total market share.  This really means one thing: people creating web applications will rethink which platform will offer them a larger audience with a low cost of entry.  Considering the fact that the iTunes store is currently saturated with redundant competitive products, the market-leading platform, Android, has a larger audience with a young but growing monetizable marketplace! Would a developer prefer to be one of 100,000 iPhone apps or 1 out of 50,000 discoverable apps! The early birds will definitely get the worm on this growing opportunity. The side effect of this: these browsers (Opera available on many non-Apple mobile platforms with the now leading market share and Google Chrome with the fastest mobile web performance) are poised to support full Flash 10.1 this year (Flash 10.1 now under Android 2.1 and soon on Blackberry and Nokia ,etc). And support for Flash means supporting all of what the web could be and is despite the overbearing opinion of the now 3rd place and dropping mobile OS creator, Apple.

The lesson here is that being first-to-market is profitable and valuable and helpful to an entire industry in terms of encouraging good competition.  But leading and first-to-market initiative cannot be replaced with slowing innovation and attempting to control the market through non-innovative closed systems like Apples development platform or their iTunes App Store. Open growth with continued first-to-market innovation will win every time.

Here is my prediction:  Apple can maintain market share and even grow if it continues to innovate and be first-to-market on differentiators.  This explains the quick success in their most recent product lines (from macbooks to iphones). If their business plan is to simply keep competition out and lock in their target market through closed-loop financial eco-systems, then their “market share” will simply trade them in for something more innovative and more open and competitive within one product generation.  If apple doesn’t heed the trend then they will be left with their fanboys foolishly ranting technological misinformation from the teet of Apple.