iPhone market share hijinks
There are a number of headlines today about Apple losing their way in the smartphone marketplace share battle, but a look at the numbers, and how you parse them, makes a difference in how it all sounds.
According to the popular Mark Twain misquote of Disraeli, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” That it is a misquote does not mean that it is not true. However the statistics are not generally to blame, but rather the way in which the numbers are interpreted and reported. A recent report by Quantcast points out the percentage of change in the month-to-month growth of sales of various smartphones, as reported in a CultOfMac story.
Looked at in a certain way, the iPhone’s month-to-month growth percentage is down slightly, while the same calculation is up slightly for all Android phones. That makes a lot of sense, given that the Android phones are just beginning to enter the marketplace, and when you are only selling a few thousand phones a month it does not take many additional sales to look good. If you sold 800 phones month before last and 1,000 phones last month, selling 3,000 phones this month means that you have not only tripled tripled your sales from last month, you have increased the statistic being measured in the Quantcast report by a factor of 10. That is the relative position of the Android phones.
On the other hand, if you are Apple, and you sell millions of phones per month, it does not take much of a statistical wrinkle to make your percentage change go down. That does not necessarily mean, however, that Apple is selling fewer phones per month; they are not. That means only that their relative percentage of smartphone sales increase was down a little. When you sell million of phones, it is harder to keep each month to the same growth factor, and harder yet to keep up with the percentage increases posted by the small sellers at the back of the pack. Measure the same number over a year, and the comparisons change a drastically.
The tech press are determined to write a story that says that some new handset is an iPhone killer. They have tried it with every new smartphone that has come down the pike in the last year. The fact is, it is way early to tell when Apple is selling millions of iPhones a month and the iPhone killer is still selling thousands. That does not mean that the Android is a bad phone, or that it may not someday outsell the iPhone. That just means that the Androd is not yet an iPhone killer, regardless of how badly some people want it to be.
You choose: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
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