parislemon

No, Now We Have

In his (rather ridiculous) new PandoDaily column, Farhad Manjoo pegs Android’s high-water mark as last April, and points to this post by Fred Wilson as an example of when the sky seemed to be the limit for Android. In that post, Wilson writes:

Roughly six months ago, I put up a blog post suggesting Android was going to be the dominant mobile phone operating system and that developers interested in the largest user bases ought to start developing for it in preference to iOS.

As you might expect, I got a lot of heat from Apple fanboys for that post and one of the strongest points they made was that we had not yet seen the effect of the Verizon iPhone on market share numbers.

Well now we have.

No, what we actually saw back then was a muted introduction. When Apple introduced the iPhone on the network, that model, the iPhone 4, was already several months old. More importantly, most people still believed at the time that a new iPhone was likely just two months away. This, of course, ended up being incorrect, but it still impacted would-be buyers.

How can I say that with such confidence? Look at the numbers. The April launch of the iPhone on Verizon was strong, but this past quarter — which saw a new iPhone launch on the network for the first time — was far stronger.

Back in June of last year, I wrote that the Verizon iPhone halted Android’s surge and predicted that the iPhone 5 could reverse it. All but the “iPhone 5” part proved correct. The iPhone 4S launching on Verizon alongside AT&T (and Sprint) proved to be the spark the iPhone needed to close the gap with Android.

For Verizon, the iPhone accounted for more than half of all smartphones the carrier sold.

So no, back in April, we had not seen the true effects of Verizon on iPhone sales — now we have.

Or have we?

What’s really crazy is that AT&T’s iPhone sales are still far ahead of Verizon’s — almost double, in fact. Maybe that’s because Verizon has a better selection of alternative devices. Or maybe it’s because of contract timing issues for consumers.

Remember, Verizon is the larger overall network. And again, over half of the smartphones they sold last quarter were iPhones. Who wants to bet that the Verizon iPhone numbers in 2012 will be insane?