Android App Downloads Surpass iOS App Downloads For the First Time

Android has taken the lead in application market downloads, according to reports by by market analysts. This is the first time for the platform to overtake iOS, although Apple still trumps Google in terms of revenue and per-user downloads

ABI Research recently revealed market findings during the 2nd quarter of 2011. According to the analysts, Android Market downloads have surpassed those of Apple’s App Store. During that period, Android got a 44% market share in app downloads, while Apple’s share slid to 31%.

ABI credits this trend to Google’s open approach to Android and application development, citing how the platform is open for use by multiple manufacturers, while Apple’s iOS is a closed ecosystem. Also, quarterly shipment figures point toward a decline in iPhone sales during 2Q 2011, with a 9% shipment growth compared to 15% in the previous quarter. Meanwhile, Android smartphone shipments grew 36% compared to 20% in Q1 2011.

However, ABI qualifies this trend, saying that Apple is not exactly a net loser. In terms of per-user downloads, iOS users still outnumber Android users in average, by a factor of 2-to-1. iOS is said to be a better ecosystem for developers and users. ABI attributes this to better monetization for developers and a better user experience for smartphone users. As such, Android may be overtaking iOS in terms of raw numbers, but Apple’s winning strategy is focusing its market on getting the most out of each user and out of each application.

ABI’s Mobile Applications Market Data research says the global app market is expected to reach 29 billion app downloads by end of the year, compared to 2010′s 9 billion. Meanwhile, the total smartphone install base is expected to grow 46% compared to last year’s.

BlackBerry's business problem

Addictions are tough to break, yet Research in Motion seems to be doing whatever it can to help users cast aside their CrackBerrys once and for all. Consider just a few of the reasons the Canadian maker of the BlackBerry smartphone is ailing: an international outage in mid-October; the Playbook tablet, a weak answer to the iPad; and phones with web browsing that is both laughably low-quality and slow as molasses.

All of these woes mean that RIM (RIMM) faces its greatest existential crisis yet. At a time when its product lineup and network service have never been weaker, Apple (AAPL) and Android users are fiercely attacking BlackBerry's greatest strength -- the business market. Sure, BlackBerry had its moment of hipness, when advertising built around the likes of U2's Bono helped convince kids its smartphones were cool. But "the enterprise" was always RIM's sweet spot. Selling functional e-mail devices with a proprietary -- and secure -- network is where BlackBerry has excelled. That's why its three-day service outage was such a black eye.

For a while now BlackBerry has lagged in the kind of applications that make iPhones and Android devices so popular. And recently Apple has been highlighting business applications like Dropbox and Cisco's (CSCO) WebEx in its iPhone advertising. Though Apple focuses on consumers, it frequently notes that 93% of the Fortune 500 is testing or has already deployed the iPhone -- a terrifying statistic for RIM.

Meet the top 7 app makers of 2011

At the same time Motorola (MMI), which Google (GOOG) is buying, suggests its new Droid RAZR will sell well to chief information officer buyers, who value its inexpensive but high-quality "cloud" capabilities. The cloud lets users access content on networks businesses don't have to maintain themselves. "CIOs today understand there is a shift in IT to cloud and mobilization, whether they like it or not," says Motorola Mobility CEO Sanjay Jha.

RIM still has plenty going for it. Peter Walker, the company's senior director for enterprise product management, trumpets the "BlackBerry Balance" technology, for example, which lets business customers control employees' devices while enabling the use of personal apps. It is also beefing up its offerings from independent app developers. A bevy of new phones and tablets built around a redesigned operating system is expected next year.

Most important, the company still has 70 million worldwide subscribers, and shipped some 10.6 million smartphones last quarter. "A whole lot of businesses remain BlackBerry loyalists," says Kevin Restivo, a Toronto-based analyst with market tracker IDC. He says RIM is still strong for businesses where compliance matters, like law firms. Still, he notes, "enterprise is not the exclusive domain of RIM anymore." The problem with this narcotic, it seems, is that there are many suitable replacements.

--Reporter associate Richard Nieva, This article is from the November 21, 2011 issue of Fortune.

Google : Siri is a serious threat

It sounded pretty good until Eric Schmidt said it: Siri, the so-called personal assistant app on Apple's iPhone 4S, is the new face of search. Siri is threatening to sideline the tried-and-true search box that Google turned into a cross between a wishing well and the most trusted way to navigate a rapidly sprawling web. Some said that Google should be concerned. Others, predictably, overreacted and labeled Siri a "Google killer."

Then last week Google's (GOOG) former CEO and current chair released his responses to Senate subcommittees looking into Google's dominance in the search industry. In the past few years, Schmidt has transitioned from a seasoned and successful CEO to something of a loose cannon who spends most of his time retracting, or explaining or laughing away his previous statements. So when Schmidt, citing some of those commentators who saw Apple's (AAPL) Siri as a Google competitor, suggested that Siri could be a force in search, he drew a skeptical response. Some said Schmidt was just downplaying Google's prominence in search. Others pointed out that Siri's own default search engine is Google.

But how can Google be a monopoly that is about to get its clock cleaned by Apple? The truth is less certain, if equally dramatic: The search industry is in the early stages of a disruptive period of change. It will look more like Siri than Google does today -- that is, it will have a more intuitive AI feel to it. Apple and Google -- and maybe even Microsoft (MSFT) -- will play a key role in shaping it. Which means it's well past time to be worrying about whether Google is a monopoly.

Smartphone Buying Guide

Before developing a purchasing strategy, organisations first need to understand the market including the major players and their operating system (OS) roadmaps. For example, Google’s Android platform and Apple’s iOS combined currently command 60 per cent market share.

The following guide outlines the top platforms and the roadmap issues that need to be considered prior to any significant investment.

Google

Android continues to be the platform of choice gaining 40 per cent of the smartphone market in 2011. Moreover, the platform will continue to mature driving developer interest in its ecosystem.

“The release of the Ice Cream Sandwich version will make the platform more appealing to developers, as the OS will unify user interfaces (UIs) across smartphones and tablet form factors,” according to Gartner analyst, Roberta Cozza.

Android’s position at the high end of the market will remain strong, but its greatest volume opportunity in the longer term will be in mid-to-low smartphones. Gartner expects Android to hold 50 per cent market share by 2015.

Nokia

Symbian’s appeal over the next two years will be limited to emerging markets and more price-sensitive consumers in mature markets. Following its alliance with Microsoft, Nokia is expected to retire Symbian during 2012 and to migrate to Windows Phone as its main smartphone OS.

This will impact Symbian’s market share, which is expected to drop globally to 21 per cent in 2011 and 6.6 per cent in 2012, Gartner said.

Nokia will push Windows Phone well into the mid-tier range of its portfolio by the end of 2012, driving the platform to be the third largest in worldwide rankings, ahead of RIM, by 2013.

Apple
Apple’s iOS will remain the second-biggest platform worldwide until 2014, according to Gartner. However, falling prices and increasing volumes of lower cost devices will impact Apple’s market share.

“Our assumption is that Apple will be interested in maintaining margins and profit, rather than pursuing market share by changing its pricing strategy, this will limit adoption in emerging markets,” Cozza said.

Blackberry

The transition to QNX will enable RIM to bring to market more competitive products which will mitigate an overall decline in market share during 2013, Gartner said.

With the migration of legacy Blackberry devices to QNX (the OS used on the Blackberry PlayBook in 2012), RIM will be able to offer users a consistent experience across its whole product portfolio and create a single developer community.

Gartner said organisations most interested in this platform will be those that have already deployed RIM infrastructure or have stringent security requirements.

HP

HP is currently undergoing a major transition. Earlier this year HP announced it would stop producing hardware based on the webOS with plans to explore new alternatives. The announcement came after continuing poor sales of new webOS smartphones and the TouchPad’s failure to capture consumer interest.

Although the webOS platform had potential as a modern OS with a good UI, Cozza said a lack of applications, services and content limited its appeal.

Samsung

Gartner said Bada has done relatively well at the low end of the smartphone market. But one problem with the platform is that it offers no development path for tablet devices. Users want to share applications across devices so this is likely to limit uptake.

Intel Without the support of Nokia, Gartner believes MeeGo has little potential to become a relevant platform in the smartphone market.

Intel has plans to merge MeeGo with another open source effort, the LiMo Foundation, to create a new platform called Tizen. Gartner said both MeeGo and LiMo have, as separate entities, failed to attract mind share and the support of developers.

“Gartner remains unconvinced that a combined effort will change that much,” Cozza said.

Steve Jobs Is Right about Android

Over the weekend I wrote an article titled "What If Steve Jobs Is Right?" As the title implies, the post was a hypothetical look at the possibility that Steve Jobs' assertion that Android is a "stolen product" is true.

Many of the comments I have received on the article itself, as well as on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ seem to be based on emotion and the personal opinion the commenter holds of Apple and Steve Jobs. Those things have nothing to do, though, with patent law or the realities of whether or not Android infringes on Apple patents.

Let's take a closer look at some of the arguments being thrown about as evidence that Steve Jobs is wrong about Android:

Android Existed Before iOS Was Conceived

I have no idea when Jobs or Apple actually conceived iOS, but Android--the company--was founded in 2003, and bought by Google in 2005. Based on that simple chronology many Android loyalists and Apple bashers jump to the conclusion that Android couldn't possibly infringe on Apple patents for iOS that wasn't made available until 2007.

There are a couple flaws in this logic. First, he who patents first, wins. There are steps in the patent-granting process designed to identify similar technologies that already exist--or "prior art". The fact is that whatever concepts and technologies Apple owns patents for made it through that process and were awarded to Apple. Even if the developers at Android thought something up first--or something that was identical to what Apple came up with--Apple appears to have won the patent race.

The second flaw in this argument is that Android as it was released by Google, and as we see it today, is different than the Android operating system that Google bought in 2005. Just because there was an Android operating system prior to iOS doesnt preclude Google from going back and dramatically retooling it to mimic iOS.

Android Isnt an Exact Copy of iOS

Nobody is claiming that it is. Apple (and Microsoft) assert that key portions of Android infringe on technologies and concepts it owns patents for.

Apple, With 4 Percent of Handset Market, Captures 52 Percent of Profits

Apple may have lost its crown as the top shipper of smartphones this past quarter, but the iPhone maker hauled in more than half of the mobile industry's operating profits during that period, according to a new research note from Canaccord Genuity analyst T. Michael Walkley.

That despite having just 4.2 percent of the global handset market.

"With Nokia in the midst of a challenging smartphone strategy transition and our checks indicating RIM and Motorola Mobility continue to struggle in North America given the increasingly competitive Android smartphone market, we believe Apple will gain further value share in the December quarter and could capture over 60 percent of industry profits," Walkley wrote in his note, according to All Things D.

Samsung shipped the most smartphones in the third quarter, according to separate reports from IDC and Strategy Analytics last week. But Samsung's margins of 17 percent on its handsets were dwarfed by Apple's 35 percent margins for the quarter. So while Samsung did capture a healthy 29 percent of operating profits in the third quarter, Apple was king with 52 percent of the profits available to handset makers from July to September (full chart below).

Apple only makes high-margin smartphones, so while it did own about a 15 percent percent share of that market in the third quarter, according to industry research, its share of the overall handset market came in at below 5 percent. Samsung accounted for nearly 24 percent of smartphone shipments in the quarter and had about 22 percent of the overall mobile phone market in the three-month period.

While Samsung was overshadowed by Apple in terms of operating profit in the quarter, other handset makers were absolutely obliterated. Nokia shipped far and away the most units in the third quarter 6 million, according to IDC—but captured just 4 percent of the operating profits during the period.

HTC and Research in Motion each had less than 10 percent of the profits reported by handset makers for the quarter, while Sony Ericsson struggled to scratch out 1 percent. LG Electronics and Motorola Mobility reported losses in the third quarter.

Speech Recognition Through the Decades

Looking back on the development of speech recognition technology is like watching a child grow up, progressing from the baby-talk level of recognizing single syllables, to building a vocabulary of thousands of words, to answering questions with quick, witty replies, as Apple's supersmart virtual assistant Siri does.

Listening to Siri, with its slightly snarky sense of humor, made us wonder how far speech recognition has come over the years. Here's a look at the developments in past decades that have made it possible for people to control devices using only their voice.

1950s and 1960s: Baby Talk
The first speech recognition systems could understand only digits. (Given the complexity of human language, it makes sense that inventors and engineers first focused on numbers.) Bell Laboratories designed in 1952 the "Audrey" system, which recognized digits spoken by a single voice. Ten years later, IBM demonstrated at the 1962 World's Fair its "Shoebox" machine, which could understand 16 words spoken in English.

Labs in the United States, Japan, England, and the Soviet Union developed other hardware dedicated to recognizing spoken sounds, expanding speech recognition technology to support four vowels and nine consonants.

They may not sound like much, but these first efforts were an impressive start, especially when you consider how primitive computers themselves were at the time.

1970s: Speech Recognition Takes Off
Speech Recognition Through the Decades: How We Ended Up With SiriSpeech recognition technology made major strides in the 1970s, thanks to interest and funding from the U.S. Department of Defense. The DoD's DARPA Speech Understanding Research (SUR) program, from 1971 to 1976, was one of the largest of its kind in the history of speech recognition, and among other things it was responsible for Carnegie Mellon's "Harpy" speech-understanding system. Harpy could understand 1011 words, approximately the vocabulary of an average three-year-old.

Harpy was significant because it introduced a more efficient search approach, called beam search, to "prove the finite-state network of possible sentences," according to Readings in Speech Recognition by Alex Waibel and Kai-Fu Lee. (The story of speech recognition is very much tied to advances in search methodology and technology, as Google's entrance into speech recognition on mobile devices proved just a few years ago.)

The '70s also marked a few other important milestones in speech recognition technology, including the founding of the first commercial speech recognition company, Threshold Technology, as well as Bell Laboratories' introduction of a system that could interpret multiple people's voices.

1980s: Speech Recognition Turns Toward Prediction
Over the next decade, thanks to new approaches to understanding what people say, speech recognition vocabulary jumped from about a few hundred words to several thousand words, and had the potential to recognize an unlimited number of words. One major reason was a new statistical method known as the hidden Markov model.

Rather than simply using templates for words and looking for sound patterns, HMM considered the probability of unknown sounds' being words. This foundation would be in place for the next two decades (see Automatic Speech Recognition—A Brief History of the Technology Development by B.H. Juang and Lawrence R. Rabiner).

Equipped with this expanded vocabulary, speech recognition started to work its way into commercial applications for business and specialized industry (for instance, medical use). It even entered the home, in the form of Worlds of Wonder's Julie doll (1987), which children could train to respond to their voice. ("Finally, the doll that understands you.")

However, whether speech recognition software at the time could recognize 1000 words, as the 1985 Kurzweil text-to-speech program did, or whether it could support a 5000-word vocabulary, as IBM's system did, a significant hurdle remained: These programs took discrete dictation, so you had … to … pause … after … each … and … every … word.

1990s: Automatic Speech Recognition Comes to the Masses
Speech Recognition Through the Decades: How We Ended Up With SiriIn the '90s, computers with faster processors finally arrived, and speech recognition software became viable for ordinary people.

In 1990, Dragon launched the first consumer speech recognition product, Dragon Dictate, for an incredible price of $9000. Seven years later, the much-improved Dragon NaturallySpeaking arrived. The application recognized continuous speech, so you could speak, well, naturally, at about 100 words per minute. However, you had to train the program for 45 minutes, and it was still expensive at $695.

The advent of the first voice portal, VAL from BellSouth, was in 1996; VAL was a dial-in interactive voice recognition system that was supposed to give you information based on what you said on the phone. VAL paved the way for all the inaccurate voice-activated menus that would plague callers for the next 15 years and beyond.

2000s: Speech Recognition Plateaus--Until Google Comes Along
By 2001, computer speech recognition had topped out at 80 percent accuracy, and, near the end of the decade, the technology's progress seemed to be stalled. Recognition systems did well when the language universe was limited--but they were still "guessing," with the assistance of statistical models, among similar-sounding words, and the known language universe continued to grow as the Internet grew.

Did you know speech recognition and voice commands were built into Windows Vista and Mac OS X? Many computer users weren't aware that those features existed. Windows Speech Recognition and OS X's voice commands were interesting, but not as accurate or as easy to use as a plain old keyboard and mouse.

Speech Recognition Through the Decades: How We Ended Up With SiriSpeech recognition technology development began to edge back into the forefront with one major event: the arrival of the Google Voice Search app for the iPhone. The impact of Google's app is significant for two reasons. First, cell phones and other mobile devices are ideal vehicles for speech recognition, as the desire to replace their tiny on-screen keyboards serves as an incentive to develop better, alternative input methods. Second, Google had the ability to offload the processing for its app to its cloud data centers, harnessing all that computing power to perform the large-scale data analysis necessary to make matches between the user's words and the enormous number of human-speech examples it gathered.

In short, the bottleneck with speech recognition has always been the availability of data, and the ability to process it efficiently. Google's app adds, to its analysis, the data from billions of search queries, to better predict what you're probably saying.

In 2010, Google added "personalized recognition" to Voice Search on Android phones, so that the software could record users' voice searches and produce a more accurate speech model. The company also added Voice Search to its Chrome browser in mid-2011. Remember how we started with 10 to 100 words, and then graduated to a few thousand? Google's English Voice Search system now incorporates 230 billion words from actual user queries.

Speech Recognition Through the Decades: How We Ended Up With Siri And now along comes Siri. Like Google's Voice Search, Siri relies on cloud-based processing. It draws what it knows about you to generate a contextual reply, and it responds to your voice input with personality. (As my PCWorld colleague David Daw points out: "It's not just fun but funny. When you ask Siri the meaning of life, it tells you '42' or 'All evidence to date points to chocolate.' If you tell it you want to hide a body, it helpfully volunteers nearby dumps and metal foundries.")

Speech recognition has gone from utility to entertainment. The child seems all grown up.

The Future: Accurate, Ubiquitous Speech
The explosion of voice recognition apps indicates that speech recognition's time has come, and that you can expect plenty more apps in the future. These apps will not only let you control your PC by voice or convert voice to text--they'll also support multiple languages, offer assorted speaker voices for you to choose from, and integrate into every part of your mobile devices (that is, they'll overcome Siri's shortcomings).

The quality of speech recognition apps will improve, too. For instance, Sensory's Trulyhandsfree Voice Control can hear and understand you, even in noisy environments.

As everyone starts becoming more comfortable speaking aloud to their mobile gadgets, speech recognition technology will likely spill over into other types of devices. It isn't hard to imagine a near future when we'll be commanding our coffee makers, talking to our printers, and telling the lights to turn themselves off.