The volume of apps available in the Google Play app store has caught up to Apple, and Android is winning in app downloads as well.
Apple leads Android in enterprise adoption, and in retail shopping use by consumers. When it comes to real world usage data, Apple has an overwhelming share of smartphone and tablet app sales, Web browser use, and ad network hits. In spite of a greater than six-to-one advantage in device market share, Android doesn’t sell more apps, or generate more advertising revenue than Apple. There is another area where dominant market share isn’t turning out to be an advantage for Android. The remainder is primarily Samsung, which makes up 39.9 percent of the total Android devices shipped. It turns out that two thirds of the devices that make up Android’s 81 percent market share are cheap “junk phones”. The cause of the discrepancy between market share and profit lies in the second half of the IDC market share statement about Android. Apple and Samsung combined actually add up to more than 100 percent of all profit for the mobile industry, because all of the other players, like HTC, LG, Motorola, Nokia, and BlackBerry lost money. Samsung made 53 percent of the profit for the quarter. The profit data illustrates how Apple’s primary rival is really Samsung-not Android. Data from Canaccord Genuity shows that during that same period-Q3 of 2013-Apple made more money than all of its competitors combined, taking in 56 percent of the profit in the mobile device market. The reality is that Apple is quite comfortable with the market share data, because the profit numbers are all Apple.