A new survey of real-time smartphone usage has confirmed both that Android dominates the global smartphone market and that its usage is heavily influenced by how much money users have.
Android’s close ties to the spending power of a particular market means it dominates in low-income countries, but see less usage in high-income markets.
Apple, by contrast, does the opposite.
For example, Android has 92.25 percent – basically all – of the Egyptian smartphone market, which is ranked 120th in worldwide GDP per capita. In India, with a GDP rank of 142, Android controls 88.71 percent of the market.
Yet in Taiwan, Google takes just 20.14 percent share and under 32 percent in Denmark Sweden, Norway and Australia.
51Degrees, which does device detection for website operators, compiled the figures, which were gathered by monitoring web usage in retail.
Real-time usage is generally considered to be a more accurate reflection of what people are actually using, rather than shipments of new devices in a particular market.
Thanks to global income inequality Android smartphones account for four out of five devices sold in the world.
Apple in turn takes its profits from just the thirty richest economies in the world while dominating in the top ten richest.
$549 for the cheapest Apple phone mean it is beyond the reach of many Chinese, which remains 89th in the global ranking of GDP per capita.
In theory, both Apple and Google shouldn’t care. One takes lower profit and high volume, while the other takes much more profit but sells fewer devices.
Yet both could be easily upended by Chinese rivals, as we’ve covered here, who are coming on fast and don’t play by the standard rules of the market.
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