mobile-devices

What Mobile Device to Optimize Your Website For?

We deal with a lot of incoming calls from businesses who are trying to acclimate to the trends that the web follows. Social media integrations, with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn (for B2B sales/marketing), and mobile optimization is the other.

Some recent data published by the head of Google’s Android development shows that the winner is clear cut. According to Andy Rubin, over 700,000 NEW Android devices are activated daily. How does that measure up to the iPhone or a major Apple launch? The iPhone 4s had a similar number of activations over its debut weekend. That’s right, the biggest launch of 2011 for Apple (aside from the iPad), matches the daily clip of Android. Rubin was also careful to clarify that these are new activations and not resold phones (which Steve Jobs had criticized Google for including in their quote before).

That amounts to a whopping 42.7% of market share for mobile devices, compared to 27.1% for Apple. And at the current rate of activations, it wouldn’t be shocking to see Android pick up more market share. As major phone carriers work to have the next exciting Android launch on a monthly basis, and Apple struggles to provide meaningful upgrades once a year, it wouldn’t be a shock if Apple’s mobile devices begin to fade, much like Blackberry and RIM have over the last decade. I know that this is probably blasphemous to say, but we’ve seen this happen before- Blackberry was the first to the pile, the innovator and the Goliath at the same time. But they became set in methodologies that limited their growth and that weren’t responsive enough to end users. As a result, they’ve faded to a distant 3rd. Apple will need to find a way to make its launches more meaningful (better features and more advances in hardware and software), more frequent (did we really need to wait so long for Siri?), and more accessible.

In the meantime, those 700,000 users added daily mean that Android devices are becoming more prominent in the mobile marketplace and that OS and platform is the one to optimize for.

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