A big world of OS's

Android, iOS, Windows Phone, RIM, Windows 7, OSX, Linux. One of the most exciting things to happen online over the past couple of years is the fragmentation of the consumer-use OS market. With the proliferation of smart-phones and tablets we now have many platforms we need to consider when presenting a digital strategy. Growth in the mobile OS market for 2011 was huge but techradar reports that the mobile market growth will slow in 2012. Still, Ericsson is predicting that by 2015 half or more of web traffic will be on mobile devices.

This means that for any project the user traffic needs to be analyzed to better understand what OS most of the users in that area are running. Potential solutions could be to target a single OS, or adapt technologies that allow you to easily develop across multiple platforms. Phonegap, one example of many, allows the development of applications across all major mobile phone OS’s.

The problem isn’t as simple as total marketshare. As slashgear reports 6x as much money was grossed in the top 200 apps for Apple’s App store as opposed to Android’s Marketplace. And, straight app sales aren’t as profitable as the hype suggests. TechCrunch reported that the bottom 90% of applications averaged 11,625 units total. When you consider most apps cost $0.99 you can see how hard it would be to make a profit over development costs.

The OS by device breakdown.

For phones 2011 Was the year of Android showing the OS top the mobile market. Nielsen ratings from November show the OS having a ~43% market share of the smart-phone market. Apple’s iOS came in second place with ~28% and RIM Blackberry came in third with ~18%. That leaves Nokia’s Symbian and Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 marginalized but the two are not out, as the first Nokia powered Windows phones came out and the end of 2011. I expect modest growth for the Windows Phone OS in 2012.

In the tablet market iOS is still the dominate player with a stunning 68% market share according to techcrunch. Android seems to have a respectable 29% marketshare but as techcrunch points out much of the android tablet market is the kindle fire, which is a heavily modified version of the OS that doesn’t work with android marketplace (Amazon but it’s own app store). I expect growth from Android in the tablet market for 2012 but it’s unlikely we are going to see any other OS contenders and for now iOS is still on top.

Desktops are still the largest share of the web by far. According to a summary on Wikipedia Windows ranged from 77-87% of total web traffic, while OSX took 6-14% of the market. That shows that mobile is still a small piece of the total pie.