It would seem that Android’s growth is not stopping by any means as Sundar Pichai, Google’s head of Chrome and Android has updated us via the Google I/O 2014 keynote that Android tablets now dominates at 62% of the global tablet market share.
This is quite a jump when considering that the market share in 2012 to 2013, is 39% and 46% respectively. The percentage increase for these two years is at 7% as compared to 2014 increase over 2013 which is at 16%. The jump from 2012 to 2014 is close to double at 23%. This suggests that the availability of Android tablets and the support of apps and games in general has attracted consumers to embrace these devices. It is also interesting to note that the numbers also coincide with the Nexus 7 2012 and 2013 variants indicating that Google’s strategy of an affordable tablet has paid off in pushing developers to provide support for tablets as well as attracting potential users.
Moving forward, Sundar provided more numbers in the form of Youtube usage in which 42% coming from Android tablets. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise seeing that Youtube is a part of Google and as an Android user, it is pretty hard to not know what Youtube is. What is amazing however, is that the increase in tablet usage amounts to 236% yearly which could be indicative of online streaming playing a larger role as entertainment for the average user.
It would be interesting to see if the Android L and the ‘fabled’ Android Silver would continue to push the growth of Android tablets aka dominance into the average consumers’ hands. As it ‘seems’ that the average user seem to hold on to the perspective that the iPads are better tablets in general (if you are an Android tablet user, average isn’t quite the word to describe you).