COMMENTARY | It's no surprise more Android smartphones are being sold worldwide every year than iPhones, at least, when you add the numbers and count every Android smartphone from every vendor. Apple sells more iPhones than any other company and makes more money per smartphone sold than most of them put together, but Google's still optimistic. The person in charge of Android at Google, Andy Rubin, wrote a blog post from Mobile World Congress on Monday, touting almost 1 million Android smartphone activations per day.
Today, he was a little more subdued while talking about Android tablets, according to Nilay Patel of The Verge. Which is not surprising since all the Android tablets sold put together barely make a dent in the iPad's sales. Rubin claimed this year Google will "double down and make sure we're winning," as though it was a matter of effort and said he wants "frugal" app developers (who aren't tailoring their apps for tablets) to "put in the muscle and make their apps work great" on them.
It's not that simple, though. Here's why Android's tablet efforts have stalled.
No viable ecosystem
This is the one Andy Rubin recognizes, although it's a little abstract. In a nutshell, it's the reason why most of you are buying Nooks and/or Kindles, instead of e-readers from Sony or Pantech. You know Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com stand for books, and you know a gadget you buy from them will be great for reading and buying them. Likewise, people aren't just buying a "tablet" when they buy an iPad; they're buying a way to use hundreds of thousands of apps on the App Store, and watch movies and things from iTunes.
Rubin says he wants "consumers to recognize [Android] as a viable platform," and to "understand what ecosystem they're buying into." Presumably, he means the one that gets its songs, movies and apps from the Android Market. Google is not exactly a household name for those things, however, and neither are pretty much any of the companies that make Android tablets today.
This hasn't stopped Android smartphones from selling, though. And that's partly because of ...
Price
Not just the price of the smartphones (you can get a 2010 iPhone 4 for $99 on-contract), although that's part of it. It's also the fact that you can buy an Android smartphone off-contract, on a pay-as-you-go system or prepaid wireless carrier. The iPhone isn't available prepaid, and would be incredibly expensive if it were, since you pay the whole cost of the phone up-front when you buy it that way.
This really just hints at the bigger reason Android smartphones are winning, though, and that's because of ...
The carriers
It's no secret the wireless carriers hate the iPhone. They need it to compete, but they wish they didn't because it's a giant funnel giving "their" money to Apple. So as John Gruber of Daring Fireball explains, when you walk into the Sprint or Verizon store, the salespeople steer you toward Android phones because those are more profitable for them as well as more locked-down by them, with carrier branding and non-uninstallable garbage and sometimes spyware like Carrier IQ.
The carriers like having that much control over your smartphone and making that much money from it. They want every smartphone to be like that. And they're the ones who sell pretty much all the smartphones. Do you see where this is going? Gruber also points out the obvious: No one walks into a Sprint or Verizon store to buy "tablets."
Instead, they're going to the Apple Store to buy iPads.
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