I made the prediction this year that iPads would dominate over all Android tablets, mainly because of the poor showing early on in the year and the over-hyped releases to come. Most of that came to pass. Some things I left out were bigger than I thought (hello Samsung Galaxy and Motorola Xoom), and others everyone missed completely (Kindle Fire).
But even with all that guessing and misstepping, the iPad still kicked butt. All. Year. Long.
From comScore’s report on Digital Omnivores: How Tablets, Smartphones and Devices are Changing Media Consumption Habits:
OS Market Share by Digital Traffic
Another way of defining platform market share is through the share of Internet traffic measured through browser-based page views. By this definition, iOS held an even stronger position in the market. In August 2011, the iOS platform accounted for more than half (58.5 percent) of the share of total non-computer traffic in the U.S, with the iPad’s dominance in the tablet market playing a key role in its position. In fact, iPads delivered 97.2 percent of all tablet traffic and even edged out iPhones in delivering the highest share of traffic for the iOS platform (46.8 percent vs. 42.6 percent of iOS traffic). Android OS once again ranked second, delivering 31.9 percent of overall non-computer traffic in August. RIM followed with a 5.0 percent market share. Other platforms, including Windows Mobile, combined to account for the remaining 4.6 percent of digital traffic.
And the graph from comScore, which is the clincher (click for full size):
See the light blue section for Apple? Now compare that with Android. One word: ouch.
iPad represents pretty much ALL of the tablet traffic as of August, 2011. Android isn’t even a dent in the pie. After dozens of tablet releases. Android is winning hearts and minds with the mobile game, but they’re being ignored by the tablet crowd. Maybe the stats will be different by years end, but Android has a lot of catching up to do.
Good luck with that, guys.
One of the reasons IPad is dominating the marked is that Apple blocked the top contenders (well.. the top contender, Samsung) from selling their product for most of the year.
Even if the block was finally lifted, it may be too late for that generation of tabled as the market is already saturated with IPads, and the trend is not likely to revert this chrismast.
We’ll see what happen with the next generation of Android tablets.