Business Insider, a respected publication and statistical collector, has just put out a new BI Intelligence report on the Android operating system – and some very disturbing and exciting information was uncovered. The report uncovers something that Android lovers have known all along – “Android is under appreciated as a commercial platform – as a revenue driver for the e-commerce, advertising, and software industries.” They found that too many analysts still have the antiquated idea that Android is outdated, full of malware and fragmented and actually believe that Android users don’t spend money on via the mobile platform – ever wonder why Apple iOS users get everything first. The report shows that the Android audience is growing at a much faster rate than iOS and we now have a globally estimated 1.2 billion active users.
Some of the main points that they found were that businesses that neglect the Android user are seriously limiting their marketing potential – it is about twice the size of iOS’s user base. It is growing much faster rate and Android is driving mobile revenues up and mobile e-commerce over the Android platform is up 26-percent over last year at this time and accounts for one-fifth of all mobile e-commerce sales in the U.S. Another revelation discovered is that the perceived fragmentation problem is very “overblown” – statics show that globally 80-percent of Android devices are running the two latest versions and in the U.S., it is over 90-percent! The newest version, 5.0 Lollipop will be released this month. Google has increased the quality of apps in the Play Store and global revenue has more than doubled year-over-year in the Q1 2014. There are some analysts that believe that the Google Play revenue will surpass the Apple AppStore within five years.
What is a shame is the real problem with Android isn’t themselves, but the bloatware that gets on devices from the carriers and device manufacturers – Apple would never allow that. Google keeps pushing their “preferred” version of Android – Android with a full suite of Google apps, Search and Google play. Google is slowly winning the battle and in the Q2 2014, 65-percent of global smartphone shipments were running the preferred version of Google. Please hook up with us on our Google+ Page and let us know what you think about our beloved Android…as always, we would love to hear from you.