According to ComScore, Amazon’s Kindle Fire currently accounts for 54.4% of all Android tablets in the U.S. The runner up, the Samsung Galaxy Tab Family (7.0, 10.1, etc) comes in at a mere 15.4%. The Motorola Xoom, the first true Android tablet comes in even lower than that at 7%. The Asus Transformer Family, arguably some of the best Android tablets on the market, makes the chart at 6.3%
Those numbers aren’t all too surprising even though the Kindle Fire has only been around since November 15, 2011. How could a fairly new player in the Android tablet game dominate the market in such a short amount of time? Simply put, Amazon nailed it by being able to provide consumers what they wanted on two fronts. Price and Ecosystem.
The Kindle Fire launched at the ultra low price of $199, making it affordable to consumers unable to open their wallets in the past for such a device. Not only is the Kindle Fire affordable, the hardware specs aren’t lacking to save cost either. The Fire comes with a dual-core 1ghz CPU, 512MB RAM, 8GB storage, and a 7″ IPS display. To be able to bring all of this to consumers at a resonalbe price, Amazon sold the Fire under cost. Amazon used the Kindle Fire as a loss leader, making up for it with their vast content system.
Over the past year, the Amazon Appstore has become a complete success for the Kindle Fire and other Android devices. Most importantly, Amazon has become more profitable in some cases for app developers than Google Play according to a recent study performed by analytics firm Distimo. They compared 110 apps offered on both markets and found that 42 of them make more money on Amazon than on Google Play. The Amazon Appstore is also responsible for 28% of the revenue in these apps. The percentage of paid apps in Google Play dropped from 38% to 32% over the past year, while the percentage of paid apps in the Amazon AppStore held a steady 65%.
Other manufacturers such as Asus and Samsung have been unable to compete due to Google’s previous, confusing content ecosystem. With the re-branding of all of Google’s consumables into Google Play, Google aims to change that in the coming near future. In 2012, Google will be putting the Google into Android tablets, tackling everything that Amazon has proven successful with; ecosystem, hardware, and marketing.
Sources: TechCrunch, Distimo