Fanbois vs fandroids: Punters display 'tribal loyalty'
Buying a new mobe? You'll stick with the same maker - survey
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Does how you feel about your current smartphone really inform the handset you’ll acquire two, three or four years hence? The Yankee Group, a market watcher, thinks it might. And that’s good news for Apple. Possibly.
Apple currently sits just behind Google in the future purchasing stakes. According to Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, another market research firm, their US market shares are, respectively, 43.7 per cent and 49.3 per cent. Those numbers are for Q1 2013 and are derived from talking to thousands of smartphone buyers.
Yankee’s figures, likewise obtained by asking punters - 16,000 of them - puts Apple’s March 2013 share of the smartphone arena at 29 per cent and Android’s at 50 per cent. These amount to 20 per cent and 34 per cent of the overall mobile phone market in the States. Surely it’s a sign of Android’s rise and Apple’s descent, at least in terms of market share if not absolute sales figures?
Not so, says Yankee. It found that 91 per cent of iPhone owners it spoke to said they will buy another version when they upgrade their handset. Only 76 per cent of Android users made the same claim. 24 per cent of fandroids expect to move to another platform, they say - around 18 per cent of them to iOS. Extrapolating from these proclaimed levels of satisfaction with users’ current platforms, Yankee reckons that come 2016, Apple’s share of the US phone market will have grown to 37 per cent while Android’s will remain at 34 per cent.
Incidentally, BlackBerry’s share will have declined from three per cent now to two per cent by 2016, while Windows Phone’s share will have risen from four per cent to seven per cent over the same period. Other smartphone operating systems will still account for just over two per cent.
US smartphone purchases. Source: Yankee Group
With Android’s share the same over the years, and others’ market share slightly up or down, where will Apple’s growth come from in this picture? Yankee reckons it'll draw from the number of folk who are still using ordinary phones. Come 2016, that group will account for only 15 per cent of phone owners - down from 32 per cent in 2013.
Looking at the smartphone market alone, that gives Android a 40 per cent share and Apple a 49 per cent share, so it’s not like Apple will have regained its once mighty domination of the market.
Buying intentions will only take you so far, of course. A punter might be very loyal to one platform now and be sure he (or she) will stick with it when they come to upgrade, but their ambitions may not take into account developments in smartphone technology in the coming years, how vendors promote and price their products, or even what their friends and family adopt. All these factors can make a mess of the best laid plans.
And folk coming to smartphones for the first time can have no brand loyalty to Android or iOS, of course.
Fanboys, then, shouldn’t assume that their favoured platform - whichever it happens to be - will dominate on the basis of these data. What we can say is that Android’s rapid rise over the past five years is historical fact, and it’s generally better to extrapolate from what people have done than what they might do. ®
COMMENTS
Highly Rated
Sounds like the author is committing the same sin
You can't predict future performance from the past. If you had projected growth numbers forwards in the early days of the railways then you would have concluded that by 1900 there would be a station at every house and trains would travel at over 900 mph. All of these analysts reports are little more than casting the runes or examining the entrails of chickens, that is wildly inaccurate in most cases for anything beyond the short term.
Less to with fanboism than stickiness
There's an extremely good reason that Apple, Google and Microsoft all use DRM on their content and and increasingly cloud based services - stickiness. The more you invest in a platform, both financially and in terms of reliance on its services, the less likely or able you are to switch.
Look at all the bullshit going on with buying books, movies or TV shows. There *could* be a single industry wide DRM and content specification which lets people use their content from any compliant device, but then people could move and we can't have that now can we?
The best way to ensure your options are open is to avoid buying anything but apps (which are unavoidably proprietary), and if you must buy things, attempt to do so from platform agnostic services - music / video / book services which provide clients for all operating systems and have no stake in which succeeds.
Lies, damn lies and statistics
Top left of chart: "US Consumer Survey".
We know that Apple enjoys strong brand loyality in the US but not outside of it, so the %s are to be expected.
People like to forecast, but then nobody in 2007 forecast the MASSIVE RECESSION we've had since - including all those over-paid Central Bankers who somehow feel they have the wisdom to tell other economies what's good for them even though those same Central Bankers ALL failed to predict the worst recession on record.
Forecasts are bullshit. People who consume them are eating bullshit.
'Yankee Group' = more like the 'JerkOffee Group'
£20 or £400
So all those people who still do not use smart phones and currently spend <£100 on a phone will all suddenly decide that a £400 handset is for them, somewhat unlikely. Especially as we see Apple's growth slowing already and Android still rising.
Maybe these people will continue to use the dumb phones they are happy with.
When I eventually upgrade my iPhone 4, I won't be sticking with iOS I don't think unless Apple suddenly comes up with something genuinely brilliant which is something they haven't done recently.
