Net Applications published a report on Friday, saying the web presence of Android devices peaked in November at 28% and has been drifting down ever since. Apple’s iOS however, has been rising since October, following the company’s launch of the iPhone 5 and iPad mini.
That’s quite a different story than the one being told by market research firms like IDC, which has Samsung’s Android-based smartphones outselling the iPhone and Samsung’s tablets rapidly catching up to Apple’s iPad. “IDC says Android is the new king of tablet market share,” was Thursday’s headline on CNNMoney.
The Fortune writer, Phillip Elmer-DeWitt, goes on to say that discrepancy makes him skeptical about data such as IDC’s that count tablet shipments, especially when out of all of the tablet makers, only Apple releases actual sales numbers.
Net Applications uses browser data from 160 million users per month, weighted geographically according to the number of users in each country.
Elmer-DeWitt asks, “How can Google’s Android be the king of tablets and smartphones if more than 60% of Web users are on Apple devices and only 24.5% on Android?”
What do you think reader? Are numbers like those that IDC use for their reports hopelessly skewed, or are plenty of Android devices being sold, only to be left in a drawer, or on a bedside table to be hardly, if ever used? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.
Oh, and by the way, in the interest of full disclosure, I did purchase a Nexus 7 tablet last fall. I know it’s around here somewhere…
