Android vs. iPhone

July 31, 2013 - By

It’s not really fair to compare a closed ecosystem to an open source one, but let’s try. Android and iOS are the extreme platforms: One is super open, the other super closed.

Apple has 6 different pieces of hardware called an “iPhone”. There have been 6 versions of the OS: 93% of users are on the latest (iOS6), 6% on the second latest.

Android has 11,868 pieces of hardware that qualify as Android phones. There have been 10 versions of the OS: 33% of users are on the latest (Jelly Bean), 25% on the second latest, 37% on the third latest.

The following link has some pretty interesting tidbits in it:

  • Android older than 2.3 (Gingerbread) is beyond what we should test unless a site’s analytics say otherwise. I’m personally pretty happy on 3 and up (Google has a policy where it supports the latest 2 versions of a browser… also Android 2 doesn’t support @font-face 😉
  • The most popular Android phone is the Samsung Galaxy S3. It has 6% of the market :S
  • The Android fragmentation is going to keep getting worse, the best quote:
When OpenSignal did a similar study last year… it found 3,997 Android models from 599 brands. This year’s study found 11,868 models across 1,778 brands in over 200 countries. Almost 3,000 of these devices appeared only once.

I’m not super sure what the mosaic image is at the top; it would be good to know which devices are most popular for testing on.

BlackBerry isn’t discussed here unfortunately, but they’re right in the middle; a bit more hardware than Apple, and I’m assuming the OS factor is closer to Apple’s stats than Google’s; most users are probably in BB10 or BB os7/6 (as a web developer I consider 6 and 7 the same: according to Crackberry os 7 was almost called 6.1 – from a browser standpoint I’ve never seen differences).

http://qz.com/109657/here-are-the-11868-devices-and-counting-that-every-android-app-has-to-work-on/

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This post was written by ArleyM