Android growth slows in US as iPhone shoots ahead in December

ComScore figures show that Android had second slow month in a row while Apple added 3.2m users - but BlackBerry and Windows Phone now have struggle for third place.

The number of new Android users was the smallest added since April 2012, when only 0.3m new users were added. Android's share of the market dipped for the second successive month to 52.3%, from the peak of 53.7% in November 2012.

But the figures still give Android the largest share of the smartphone market, which has now reached 129.4m users in the US - 55.3% of the 234 million people aged over 13 with phones by ComScore's figures.

The data are collected from "an intelligent online survey of a nationally representative sample of mobile subscribers age 13 and older." It only counts primary mobile phones, and doesn't include second phones provided by employers.

According to the data, there were 67.7m Android users in January 2013 - compared to 49.2m at the start of 2012, a gain of 18.5m. Apple's iPhone, meanwhile, grew from 29.9m to 48.9m, an increase of 19m.

Together, Android and iOS have 90.1% of the US smartphone market.

That leaves BlackBerry and Windows Phone fighting it out for the third place spot. BlackBerry still leads with 7.6m handsets in use, against 4m for Windows Phone. But while BlackBerry has lost 7.8m users in the past year, Microsoft has not so far been able to benefit - with its total number of handsets running Windows Mobile or Windows Phone actually dropping by 0.5m in the same period, even though the total number of smartphone users has grown by 28.1m.

Samsung is the second largest smartphone supplier in the US, ComScore said, with a 21.4% share, equivalent to 27.7m users. With few, if any, users of its Bada system in the US, that means that Samsung has 41% of the Android market - slightly lower than its worldwide share, which is closer to 50%.

After that comes HTC, with a 9.7% share of the overall smartphone installed base. Its position in the US reflects the struggles it has been having more broadly: on Wednesday it announced that its revenues in February fell by 44% year-on-year. In the US, the ComScore data shows that HTC's user base has fallen from a peak of 15m in January 2012 to 12.6m a year later.

Google-owned Motorola had an 8.6% share, down from 10.0% three months earlier. Like HTC, Motorola's installed base has been falling steadily, both in smartphones and featurephones; as recently as March 2010 it was the most-used brand in the US.

LG was the fifth-ranked smartphone brand, with 7.0%, equivalent to 9.1m users. That has risen from 8.1m in October 2012. It's unclear whether the increase is reflected by sales of the LG-made Nexus 4 phone - which is branded as a Google phone rather than LG.

Android 5.0 Key Lime Pie Based On Linux 3.8 Kernel? Google Developing From Newly Released Source Code

Once Android 5.0 Key Lime Pie is unveiled, possibly at the Google I/O conference in May, developers and enthusiasts alike will find out whether or not the new Android operating system will be based on the recently released Linux 3.8 kernel.

Reports from Phoronix suggest the “experimental” public source code from Linux will be the framework for Android’s next OS.

While Google engineers are reportedly developing the modifications for a stable Android build with in the Linux 3.8 kernel repository, the tech company won’t be getting rid of old builds just yet. Previous Linux kernels will continue to be used on popular Android devices.

Key Lime Pie’s predecessor, Jelly Bean, is based on the Linux 3.0 kernel, with the Android 4.2.2 update for the Google Nexus 4 being released just days ago, which was based on the Linux 3.4 kernel.

Several phones such as the AT&T HTC One XL, Motorola DROID 4, Motorola DROID 3, Motorola DROID RAZR and Motorola DROID Bionic, as well as the Sprint Galaxy Nexus and the GSM Motorola RAZR, are expected to receive the Linux 3.4 based Android 4.2.2 update, according to Phandroid.

As for Android 5.0, the OS is expected to release alongside the rumored Motorola Xsmartphone, which many believe will also be unveiled at Google I/O. If so, it will be the first device powered by a Linux 3.8 kernel derived Android build. However, rumors also suggest that the Motorola X could be the same device as another smartphone highly speculated about, Google's Nexus 5.

Press Blue suggests the elusive phone may be Google’s attempt to work with Motorola since it acquired the company in May 2012, suggesting that whatever the phone is called, it may be a Motorola-manufactured phone with a Google Nexus name or some other newfangled combination of the two companies.

Nevertheless, it is highly likely that Key Lime Pie will be granted a dynamic flagship phone to introduce the new Android operating system.

Google is known for coinciding OS unveilings with phone unveilings as it did with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and the Samsung Galaxy Nexus in 2011. The extremely popular phone was notably powered by an OS based on the Linux 3.0.31 kernel.

AVP: Evolution by FOX hits the Play store

Get ready for the ultimate battle of Alien vs Predator. The folks from FOX have been teasing this game for some time, but today it finally landed in the Google Play Store. Instead of being in the middle of a war you’ll actually get to participate and it looks like loads of fun. Any AvP fan will surely want to check this out.

This brand new game AvP: Evolution brings the classic movies to our favorite Android devices. What’s even better is you’ll get to play both sides too. Yup, you can be Alien or Predator in this new mobile game. You’ll have to fork over $5 to enjoy this title, but the video below will give you an idea of what to expect. As Predator you’ll be able to fight against the hordes of enemy Aliens in an attempt to save the clan, and as Alien you’ll be saving the Alien race from enslavement by the Predators. It’s basically a nice twist on the classic movies, and has plenty of violence and gore. Take a peek below.

While $5.00 for a mobile game isn’t cheap the graphics are decent, and they promise hours of fun gameplay. Plus any fan has to get this for his collection. It offers fierce combat and tons of character level-ups to increase and enhance gameplay. FOX also added controller support too, so for those with a Bluetooth controller you can enjoy this new game even more. For those interested head to the Play Store and give it a try today.

The absolute brilliance of Google's Android strategy

Watching the flood of news from Mobile World Congress this week, it struck me that Android may be the smartest thing that Google has ever done. And Google didn't even have a booth at the show.

When Google bought Rubin's startup way back in 2005, the company was worried about proprietary mobile platforms dominating the mobile space, and locking out future opportunities for Google to distribute services -- and more important, sell ads -- on devices like smartphones. Ironically, the platform Google was worried about was Microsoft's Windows Mobile, as the iPhone was but a glimmer in Steve Jobs' eye at that point. 

But the important part was the strategy.

The Google version of Android was announced in 2007 as the cornerstone of the Open Mobile Alliance, a group of partners that included Google plus a bunch of hardware makers and some carriers. The key is that first word: Open.

This is an incredibly loaded word, with different meanings to different people, and arouses a lot of fervor and passion from folks who think commercial software is generally inferior, immoral, or both. In Android's case, there are enough angels dancing on the heads of pins (patents, Java, the Skyhook case, Motorola) to keep everybody arguing about "open" for the next decade.

But whenever I hear the word "open" from a commercial company, the first question I ask is "what are they trying to commoditize?" 

The "open" commoditization strategy runs like so:

• Undercut the competitor's business by giving a good-enough equivalent away for free.

• Enable fast improvement and unexpected uses by releasing at least some of the technical underpinnings to the world at large and allowing them to modify the platform for their own uses

IBM tried to commoditize Windows with its support of Linux in the early 2000s. I have argued that Facebook is trying to commoditize Google's datacenter advantage with the Open Compute Project.

But Google's commoditization of the market for commercial smartphone platforms is the most successful example the world has ever seen.

Android went from one of Google's many pilot projects in 2007 to become the top smartphone platform in the world by 2010. Commercial platforms like Windows Phone are struggling because Android turned the mobile device operating system into a commodity. Newer platforms like Firefox OS and Tizen don't have a chance. Who needs another open platform when there's already such a huge ecosystem built around Android?

Even more impressive, Android did this even though the smartphone market was essentially created by another company: Apple.

It would be foolish to downplay Apple's success. This is not an either-or game -- both Google and Apple are winning, and Apple is capturing the vast majority of profits in the smartphone business.

But Apple does this by offering a totally planned and integrated experience from start to finish -- from the moment you walk into the store, through opening the box, setting the phone up, using it every day, buying and installing apps, and everything else -- focusing exclusively on the consumer experience all the way through. (Former Microsoft Windows Phone GM Charlie Kindel pointed this out quite eloquently last week.)

The value is in the whole package. The platform, iOS, only serves that larger mission.

Android, meanwhile, is faced with all sorts of problems. There's fragmentation -- device makers put Android on devices with different screen sizes and processors, and carriers don't update their phones with the latest versions in a timely fashion, which means that developers have to do extra work to target all these different devices, or leave users hanging. Most Android smartphone vendors, with the notable exception of Samsung, are not making a lot of money selling the phones. There's the Amazon Kindle play, where a competitor takes the underlying Android kernel and customizes it, removing all links to Google services and replacing them with its own services, depriving Google of any hope of making money from the sale.
But from Google's perspective, it doesn't matter. The goal was simply to prevent any single commercial platform from dominating the mobile space and blocking Google entirely. Now, that's never going to happen.
The beauty of the "open" Android approach, shown at MWC this week, is that Google has an army of partners racing as fast as they can to fill every conceivable gap left by Apple, BlackBerry, and any other commercial phone vendor.
Android isn't secure enough to displace the BlackBerry in security-conscious organizations? Samsung is tackling that angle with SAFE and KNOX.
Workers need cheap special-function devices to replace the old embedded devices they used to have? American Airlines showed how it could be done with locked-down Galaxy Notes, and HP's $169 Android tablet seems tailor-made for such uses.
Consumers don't want to carry both a tablet and a phone? Fine -- that's where Android "phablets" come in.
Need more innovation? How about a dual-screen phone? Or a phone with a week's worth of battery life?
And if, for some reason, Android partners ever stop innovating to Google's satisfaction (as happened in PC business prior to Windows 8 and Microsoft Surface), Google has its own hardware company -- Motorola -- to drive innovation forward. It cost $12 billion, but subtract out the value of the patents to protect the broader ecosystem, and that looks like a pretty cheap price to pay for a big stick.
Andy Rubin may be worried about Samsung's growing dominance, as a Wall Street Journal report claimed this week, but he shouldn't lose too much sleep. Just as the "open" Android strategy helped it stop the iPhone from taking over the world, it will help beat back any other threat as well.
And meanwhile, if anybody ever figures out how to make big bucks off mobile advertising, it'll be Google.

Why Game Creators Prefer iPhone to Android

There is no great game on Android that is not also on the iPhone.

This has been true since the inception of the Android marketplace: Nearly every best-selling Android game, from Where’s My Water? to Bridge Constructor, showed up first on Apple’s devices. And the scene’s top developers say this won’t change anytime soon.

Android “is stuck as a repository for iOS ports,” says Kepa Auwae, whose company Rocketcat Games has created some of the iPhone’s most critically acclaimed titles. He has ported his games to Android, but only after first finding success on Apple’s devices. His newest game, Punch Quest, will get an Android port later this year.

Even as the Android operating system expands its market share over Apple’s iOS devices — onereport on the third quarter of 2012 showed that Android had captured over 70 percent of the market to Apple’s 13 percent — developers are sticking with iOS first. The games come out on iOS, and if they do well financially, they might show up on Android marketplaces a year or so later. The extraterrestrial exploration game Waking Mars came to iPhone and iPad in February of 2012, but didn’t show up on Android until nine months later. It took nearly two years for the pixel-art iPad favorite Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP to make its way to Android. And on and on.

According to Waking Mars co-creator David Kalina, his game has sold over 140,000 units on iOS, but fewer than 5,000 on Android.

Many other developers blame Android’s piracy problem. Android has always struggled with hackers and pirates, with some developers reporting piracy rates as high as 83 percent. But it’s not just piracy that’s the problem.

For established mobile publishers like Rovio, it’s a no-brainer to develop an Android port alongside the iOS version. Its games will almost certainly sell in both markets, so it makes sense for a surefire hit likeBad Piggies to show up on all mobile devices simultaneously. An outfit like Rovio also has the manpower to make this happen. For independent developers with limited marketing budgets, it’s not so easy.

“For us, it’s a matter of having limited time,” says Auwae. “So we have to choose one platform as our main focus. iOS wins out because games on there still make more money, while also having less support issues due to device fragmentation.”

Apple has released fewer than 20 different iterations of the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. In comparison, the maker of the Android app Open Signal found last year that its app was being run on 3,997 different devices.

“From a testing and quality assurance perspective,” says Supergiant Games creative director Greg Kasavin, “the scope is narrower if you’re making a game for, say, just the iPad 2 and newer, as opposed to many different Android tablets you’d have to purchase and test on.” The iPad version of his game Bastion, is one of the platform’s highest-rated games ever, but plans for an Android port are not in the cards.

Kevin Pazirandeh, CEO of Zombie Highway creator Auxbrain, says it’s a good idea to consider an Android port. “It’s too much money to leave on the table if you have the resources,” he said. “That said, there are a lot of developers who at least want to see their game make enough money on iOS to buy an Android Unity license and a device to test on. I think you would find that filters out about 95 percent of games that launch on iOS.”

Things may improve for Android down the line. Technologies like Unity that make porting games easier than ever are bringing more and more iOS games to Android, Pazirandeh said.

“Android’s popularity as a platform is undeniable,” says Greg Kasavin, “so I think independent developers are wise to be paying attention to it.”