Does Apple really have “a 13.7 percent global market share in the smart phone sector”? That’s what you can read in, for example, a recent mocoNews article.
However, that’s Apple’s share of smartphone units shipped during Q2 2009. But if you’re a developer wondering which smartphone platform to prioritise, you’re more likely to be interested in the share of total smartphones in use. Your application can run on devices that were sold 3 months ago, 6 months ago, 9 months ago, 12 months, and so on – provided these devices are still in use. This is often called the “installed base”.
I’m not sure if there are analysts who estimate the share of installed base for the various smartphone software platforms.
I guess that any such analyst might start by reasoning something like the following:
- On average, handsets are typically in use for about 18 months (6 quarters);
- A first order estimate of the installed base of Symbian-powered handsets can, therefore, be found from the total number of these units shipped in the last 6 quarters;
- Taking the same Canalys figures as used by the mocoNews article (see chart below – taken from the Canalys website), we can estimate this figure as roughly 6 x 19.4M, namely 116M. (This assumes that sales of Symbian devices have been, broadly, constant over this period of time.)
Next, the analyst would have to consider the second hand (and third hand) phone market. A proportion of the handsets which were sold a lot longer ago than 18 months will still be in use – not by the people who originally purchased them, but by relatives, friends, and other people who bought devices from exchange marketplaces. I’ve got no idea how to estimate that proportion. Given the outstanding longevity of some classic top-selling Symbian devices such as the Nokia 6600, I might push up the previous estimate by (say) 30%, to approaching 150 million devices.
In other words, the installed base of Symbian devices could be around 7 to 8 times the recently quarterly unit sales. The corresponding figure for Apple is, almost certainly, a lot lower.
(Not that I’m encouraging anyone in the Symbian world to become complacent!)
Footnote: Symbian Ltd used to issue figures, ever quarter, giving the total number of Symbian devices shipped to that time. By the time of the announcement of the formation of Symbian Foundation, this figure had reached around 250 million. The corresponding figure will be significantly larger by now. However, what’s being estimated above is something different: not the number of devices shipped, but the number still in use.
Disclaimer: I’ve almost certainly got aspects of this calculation wrong. Like everything else in this blog, it’s not to be taken as an official Symbian pronouncement. Instead, I offer it as a set of ideas, which others can correct, refine, and improve.
