Android – Further deterioration.

Reply to this post

Apple is 577x better at software upgrades.

• Both Android 8.0 Oreo and iOS11 have been available for a few weeks and has highlighted, once again, how bad the situation in Android.
• I continue to believe this has a fundamental impact on the Android user experience, loyalty and monetisation.
• Data from android.developer.com shows that Android Oreo is present on 0.2% of Google Android devices while iOS11 is present on 38.5% of all iOS devices.
• Android Oreo has been available for 44 days (August 21^st 2017) while iOS has been available for just one third of that time (15 days, September 19^th 2017).
• This means that the iOS user base is, on average, being upgraded 577x more quickly than Google’s user base of Android devices.
• To compound the problem, it looks as if the rate at which the user base is transitioning to newer versions of Android is slowing down.
• 12 months ago, Android 7.0 Nougat had 0.1% share of the user base and currently it has just 17.8%.
• At this rate it will take 5 years and 7 months for Oreo to completely penetrate Google’s own Android user base.
• This is substantially worse than the 4 years that I have observed in previous years.
• This means that when Google makes an innovation in functionality that requires a modification to be made to the underlying Android OS, it will take the best part of 6 years for this innovation to make it into the hands of all of its Android users.
• By contrast this process is essentially complete on iOS devices within about 3 months.
• Effectively Google is spending money on R&D that stands to benefit its competitors more than it benefits itself.
• If Apple takes a fancy to something launched at Google i/o, it can include the innovation in its latest version and have it deployed to essentially all of its users long before Google Android makes double figures.
• This combined with the endemic fragmentation, substantially hampers the user experience on Android making it inferior to iOS.
• I think there is substantial financial upside for Google if it can fix this problem which is why I continue to believe that Google Android will eventually become fully proprietary.
• This is the only way by which Google can fix these problems and it comes as no surprise that both Android Auto and Android Wear are fully proprietary.
• While the status quo persists, Apple profitability on iPhone is unlikely to be challenged although I am much more cautious around revenue growth.
• I continue to be indifferent to both Apple and Alphabet, preferring instead, Tencent, Baidu and Microsoft.