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May

Mobile Research Firm Predicts Android Market Will Surpass Apple App Store In Number Of Apps In August 2011

Posted by Aaron Gingrich in Apps/Games, News

Analyst Egle Mikalajunaite of research2guidance has modeled the growth of the Android Market and Apple App Store, and based on his predictions, the former will overtake the latter in August of this year. While we're generally pretty weary of these sort of predictions, the short-term nature certainly makes this much more plausible.

The graph largely speaks for itself, but there's a bit more to be said in terms of specific numbers. First, according to their numbers, the Market has been adding more apps per month since October of 2010. Second, it's since continued to pick up the pace (notice that you can see it ramp up quite dramatically beginning in August of 2010).

Apr

Business Insider Publishes Results Of Smartphone Survey: Android Dominates, And Lots Of People Hate Apple

Posted by Aaron Gingrich in Android OS, News

If you're a frequent reader, you may remember hearing about the Business Insider Smartphone Survey, which we called out for its biased title and questions. As promised, they have posted the results, and much as we expected, Android absolutely dominated.

51.4% of respondents use an Android device (versus 33% for iPhone).
54.4% said their next smartphone purchase would be an Android device, compared to a (still impressive) 33.6% for the iPhone.
55.7% of Android owners "hate Apple" (heh). 31.2% of Android owners would consider an iPhone if it played better with non-Apple devices.
Platform was the most important feature when choosing a smartphone with 38.2%, while features came in second at 33.1%.

Apr

Follow Up: Business Insider Closes Smartphone Survey, Starts A (Nearly) Identical One With A Less Moronic Name

Posted by Aaron Gingrich in Android OS, News

Over the weekend, we posted about a pant-crappingly stupid (and biased) survey posted by Silicon Alley Insider called "WHY WOULD ANYONE EVER BUY AN ANDROID PHONE? Take Our Smartphone Survey And Tell Us!" A few dozen of you posted in the comments to criticize just how biased SAI was with the survey, and a large number of you followed through to take it.

It looks like they may have realized the faux pas - to an extent, anyway - as they closed that one down (without tabulating the results) and reopened a new one. On the upside, the new survey has a new title: "OUR SMARTPHONE SURVEY: Please Take It!

Apr

Business Insider Wants To Know Why Anyone Would Ever Buy An Android Phone; Let's Show Them.

Posted by Aaron Gingrich in Android OS, Off-Topic

Silicon Alley Insider - the Tech section of Business Insider - posted a survey this weekend under the headline "WHY WOULD ANYONE EVER BUY AN ANDROID PHONE? Take Our Smartphone Survey And Tell Us!" Eye-catching, to say the least. The survey is 12 questions, and asks what phone (OS) you use, what your next one will use, and so on... it's all fairly standard.

The results of the survey aren't immediately available, but the site promises to publish them in a few days. SAI is generally pretty (*ahem*) Apple-friendly, but then again, they do give Android the credit it's due, so who knows what the results will show.

Mar

Amazon Launches Cloud Player Music Streaming Service For Android

Posted by Cameron Summerson in Applications, Apps/Games, News

While some companies are content to just talk, talk, talk about what they are doing, Amazon seems to be quietly hard at work. Last week they gave us the Amazon Appstore for Android and last night they dropped another bomb – the Amazon Cloud Player.

If Grooveshark and Dropbox had a baby, it would be Amazon Cloud Player. It consists of Cloud Drive - 5GB of free cloud storage on Amazon’s servers (upgradable to 20GB with the purchase of one album or for $20/year; $1 per gigabyte after that) - and the Cloud Player, which can be accessed from the web or from an Android device.

Mar

Apple Sues Amazon Over Use Of 'App Store' Name

Posted by David Ruddock in Apps/Games, Development, News

Amazon's upcoming Android Market competitor, the Amazon Appstore, is in hot water for its namesake. On Monday, Apple filed a lawsuit in a California federal court claiming Amazon had infringed on its trademark of the phrase "App Store." Apple applied for a trademark to this name way back in 2008, but it wasn't approved until January of 2010. Since then, Microsoft has filed a dispute with the trademark office alleging that the grant was improper. That complaint's outcome is still pending.

In the meantime, Amazon may have a difficult time asserting that its use of "Appstore" (as opposed to "App Store") doesn't violate Apple's trademark - it's hard to deny that Apple's App Store is a well-know name in the mobile world.

Mar

Wank-O-Meter For Android - Yes, There Is An App For That; No, Steve Jobs Would Most Definitely Not Accept It In The App Store [WTF x100]

Posted by Artem Russakovskii in Applications, News, Off-Topic

This morning, I got a new app tip in my inbox with an inconspicuous subject "New android app." Not knowing what to expect, I opened it up and read the following, followed by the app's description:

Good news! We just launched a new essential android application: the Wankometer.

At this point, I stopped reading, experiencing conflicting feelings that can only be described as a mix of extreme WTFness, curiosity, and preliminary pride for the Android platform (I had a feeling that Steve Jobs would not let this app into the iOS App Store, and I was right).

I was not let down.

Mar

Dissecting The Falsities In Apple's Misleading New "If You Don't Have An iPhone" Ad Campaign

Posted by Will Shanklin in News, Off-Topic

Ah, the arrogance of Cupertino. Does it know no bounds? In Apple's latest attempt to frame their iPhone as being the obviously superior choice over Android, a new series of ads start with "If you don't have an iPhone... ". They then proceed to boast about features that are on both iOS and Android, using their typical clever wordplay to convince the less-knowledgeable that you can only get these features on an iPhone.

The first ad starts with:

If you don't have an iPhone, you don't have the App Store. So you don't have the world's largest selection of apps.

Well no, but you have the Android Market, which is growing at a much faster rate than Apple's and that analysts predict will catch up to the App Store in the number of apps within the next several months.

Mar

Apple Haters Take Note: Conan O'Brien Just Eviscerated The iPad 2

Posted by Will Shanklin in Off-Topic

Okay, so maybe this doesn't directly relate to Android, but man, do we think some Android fans are going to like this one. With all respect to Apple, most of us are familiar with their promotional videos which can be a little, let's say, "predictable" at times. Beloved late night host Conan O'Brien created this mock iPad 2 video that... well, let's just let the clip speak for itself:

Source: Team Coco

Mar

Today's iPad 2 News Could Shake Up Tablet Prices - But Not For The Reasons You Think

Posted by Will Shanklin in Android OS, Editorials, Honeycomb 3.0/3.1/3.2, News

While we at Android Police don't exactly wait with bated breath to hear what Steve Jobs has to say at Apple announcements like the one for the iPad 2 today, we would be fooling ourselves to pretend that Apple products don't directly affect the market for Android devices. While an Android fan's first reaction to the latest iAnnouncement is often to (understandably) bash the smooth-talking fruit company from Cupertino, I believe that today's events could shake up the tablet market for the better.

The hardware of the iPad 2 is hardly a game-changer. They didn't upgrade their display from the first generation iPad (which always looked a little bit pixelated to me), though they did make it thinner and lighter.