One thing that caught my attention in the video is Android installations by country. Here is the slide.

As it shows, there is a direct correlation between device activations and app installations. US is the largest market followed Korea and Japan.  I’d assume China is part of the ‘Others’ category.

Wait…think again. Korea is the #2 market for Android and Japan is #3. Why could that be? Here is my take.

Samsung, one of the leading device maker for Android is from Korea. I’d assume they own the local market which explains strong activation numbers from Korea. Regarding Japan, it is one of those countries where Android devices are aggressively pushed by carriers – just like the way Verizon promoted Android in US. In addition, Google says direct carrier billing is very successful in Android. This makes sense as carrier billing will be promoted by carriers backing Android.

In other words, it sounds like Android success has a lot to do with carriers (or OEMs) backing it. In contrast, judging by app downloads, Apple’s #1 market is US followed by UK. Then there are countries like Germany, France, Canada, Australia, Italy etc before getting to Japan and Korea.

Carrier backing isn’t necessarily a bad thing in business as long as the market share keeps going up. But for the tablet market where carriers have little impact, Android’s success could be very limiting. Judging by this, my guess is, Android’s tablet market share will be significantly lower compared to its phone market share, despite some optimism.

I 100% agree with him that iPhone needs competition. Unfortunately, the competition doesn’t look very good so far. While John Gruber makes a case where competition could exist if executed right, I don’t see some one gaining significant share in the market, atleast in the short term.  iPhone seem to be couple of years ahead of competition in the market and so far, I still don’t see good competition for iPhone.

When hardware becomes a commodity, the value moves to the software. So the game suddenly shifts to the software vendor’s turf. Now, to provide better end user experience on an end user device like a phone, a vendor with expertise in both hardware and software has significant advantages in this market and there are not many vendors who do software and hardware and definitely not at the scale as Apple. This puts Apple much ahead of competition not just in the short term, but also in the long term. When they have a lead, it is tough to beat them, unless we see some blunders from them.

I love linux. As I geek, I spend lot of time with it and I don’t see how tens of thousands of companies (like Google) can survive without open source software like linux. That said, it is already known that Linux has not penetrated the desktop market as much as it penetrated the server market. Infact, I’ll go a step further and say that it is tough to find enough open source software with great UI/usability. On the other hand, more often than not, the server side stuff is pretty good for most of the popular open source software. I think this is true with Android. I played with it a bit and found similarities between Android and Linux (yes, it is the same core). Similar to Linux, Android has the same powerful stuff, but where it fails is the usability and the final touches it needs. I can never call any Linux software ‘pleasure to use’ (yes, including Ubuntu), but I can say that after using a Mac, for example. As long as someone takes the user experience and user interface seriously, I think Android will face the same fate as Linux.

If a new phone has to compete with iPhone, it is not good enough if it is 10% better than iPhone. It has to be significantly better than the iPhone. If it comes with a smaller vendor, it going to get much tougher.

If there is one thing I’d like to see in Android (or linux), it is the improvements to the usabiltiy and UI of the entire OS. It looks crappy, atleast to my taste. Attention to the detail is very important and it has to be a please to use. Unless someone comes up with an OS that is good for end users, they’ll keep loosing against Apple. Phone is the device that stays with us longer than any other device. It is not good enough if it is functional. It has to be ‘please to use’.