There’s no stopping for Android, it seems. Gartner, the reputable research company, is moving their predictions that Android will become #2 OS in the world by end of the year 2012, to end of this year. That’s quite a dramatic change in their predictions, I’d say.
They also say that Android will take even Nokia by the end of the year 2010, and become #1 OS with the biggest user base. Android is quite on its way to become the Windosws of smartphones, perhaps even tablets.
It’s obvious right now that this is the trend, but I would take these specific predictions of Gartner with a grain of salt. I mean they released a report a year ago saying that Android will be #2 by end of 2012, and now they are moving that to end of 2010. That makes their previous prediction worthless. And this only happend after one year. Who knows what can happen by the end of 2014.
The reason why I don’t like these reports is because they just seem to extrapolate the current growth of something and then look when the data says that what’s being measured will reach a certain milestone. But it totally ignores new factors that might influence that growth in that time interval. Windows Phone 7, Meego and even WebOs 2.0 are going to appear in the next few months and that might slow down Android’s growth quite a bit. I bet this report doesn’t take them into account.
Now on the other hand, if Android remains unaffected by them, it might even take Nokia’s Symbian much earlier than 2014. Perhaps by the end of 2012. Why? Because Symbian might be falling a lot faster in market share.
So yes I still think Android has a huge potential to become the Windows of mobiles, but not just because of some simple extrapolation that anyone could’ve done, with no real substance behind it.
[Via Gartner]