Android Tablet Sales Accelerate

Marco Arment today posted an article titled "Sales of obscure game consoles vs. non-iPad tablets". It's humorous, see, because the "Android tablets, combined", and the Blackberry PlayBook, are down there in the ranks of failed game console.

The numbers are courtesy of some hackneyed calculations.

There are a couple of problems with the calculations.

For one, the x-large profile wasn't introduced until Honeycomb. The Galaxy Tab — the original 7" device — reports itself as a large device, not an x-large. So does the ViewSonic gTablet, the Nook Color, and millions of other Android devices. On the smartphone front, even larger Android devices like the Galaxy S II declare themselves normal, not large.

Doing some cheap back-o-napkin calculations (marketshare x 135 million) with those beloved July 5th numbers, large + xlarge (2.8% + 0.9% = 3.7%) comes in at some five million devices. And that's just Android devices that can actually access the market, which many of the pre-Honeycomb devices cannot.

On August 1st Google did their periodic update. Large + xlarge (3.1% + 1.2% = 4.3%) have grown to 4.3% of the market, for a net gain of 0.6%. If we accept the prior calculations, that means in 27 days — adding the fact that the Android platform itself grew by fourteen million devices (550,000 per day) — that would bring Android tablets to 6.4 million devices.

Or a growth of 1.4 million devices in less than a month.

If we look from purely a version perspective, Honeycomb has gone from 0.9% of the version mix, to accounting for 1.3% (+0.4%), or a net gain of some 750,000 devices over 27 days. Annualized that's a mere 10 million per year, but I think it's pretty clear that the pace is accelerating: Apple isn't desperately trying to block Samsung tablets because it isn't a threat.

It's nowhere near the incredible iPad sales, but it does make Arment's claims all the more humorous. Marco can't count. It doesn't matter much for his audience, but it's the real joke of the whole thing.

I see some people offering up some long bets on this topic. I wonder if Gruber and Arment would go long on their claims.

Some people are really good at telling you about the past. Only a few are good at speaking accurately of the future.

Web Apps on Android

A few days ago on Daring Fireball (in a piece where Gruber tries backtracking on his vehement anti-webapp advocacy. He's great at talking about the past and projecting it into the future, only occasionally taking a minute to eat some of that "claim chowder")-

It’s Apple that created the “Add to Home Screen” feature in Mobile Safari, which allows mobile apps to appear on the home screen as peers to App Store apps. Android doesn’t have that feature.

He's said this a few times. I have no idea what he's talking about.

Of course Android lets you add bookmarks on your home screens. It has for years (back to at least Android 1.1, which is the earliest version I can test in the emulator). The idea itself is hardly novel. If the site provides an appropriate icon, the bookmark is indistinguishable from an app.

Better still, it if it's a true web app, such as the new Reddit mobile interface, there is no browser chrome at all when opened. Whether it's a native app or a web app is not immediately apparent, and comes down to being a question of how good the mobile browser implementation is.