Mobile phones

The future for Microsoft, Android and Windows Phone – analysis

The suggestion that Microsoft should fork Android in order to gain access to more apps, developers and potential users stirred up some debate. Charles Arthur analyses the fallout

Got that? AOSP is bigger than the iPhone. It’s one country, but it’s a really big country. AOSP phones outsold the iPhone in Q3 too. The reason for quoting ABI is that it does give the breakout of AOSP v “Google Android” (ie phones running Google services); IDC and Gartner don’t.
How about Windows Phone? ABI says that in Q4 it had 10.9m shipped, against 9.1m shipped in the third quarter. Against which the iPhone - you know, the third-placed ecosystem, if we’re counting AOSP as an ecosystem (though it’s more an aggregation of different ecosystems, such as Baidu, Xiaomi, and so on) - sold 51m and 33.8m (total 84.8m).
Now, it’s perfectly possible that every iPhone sale in those two quarters simply updated an existing iPhone, while every Windows Phone went to a new user, in which case the Windows Phone base grew by 20m and the iPhone base stayed static. But it’s unlikely; data from ComScore in the US suggests that the iPhone base grew by 5m between September 2013 (when it had 40.6% of 147.9m users) and December 2013 (when it had 41.8% of 156m users), while that for Windows Phone stayed absolutely flat.
What about Europe? Data from IDC in mid-year suggested Android in western Europe had 146m users, iPhone 59.9m users, and Windows Phone 13.3m. ComScore’s figures for November 2013, shared with me, for the “EU5” big European countries (UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain) suggested 92.9m Android users, 30.8m iPhone users and 9.5m Windows Phone users. (The difference between the two companies’ figures is likely because IDC includes more countries - Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, and so on.) According to Kantar, in the fourth quarter Windows Phone did outsell the iPhone in one of the EU5 countries: Italy (17.1% to 12.1%), and also in Mexico, Brazil and Argentina (6.8% to 4.3%). In every other country in the EU5, in the US, in China, in Australia, in Japan, the iPhone outsold Windows Phone, sometimes by large margins.
So, no - Windows Phone is not making significant inroads into the iPhone install base. It’s a distant third place in the west. Unless Microsoft’s master plan is to be in distant second place to Android in those key markets of Italy and Mexico, in which case - carry on, folks. But if you think differently - say, that Microsoft will benefit by having its services available on lots of devices, but most of all by having them used on lots of devices where it is the default - then let’s follow this.