Who will win the Mobile OS wars?

With the global smartphone penetration expected to increase 3 billion smartphones in 5 years, or half of the world's pollution the positioning of various OS platforms are becoming more and more important. Now considering the various devices powered by smartphone OS then that market far exceeds half of the world's population. With such a very big and lucrative market OS and platform developers continue to fight for market share, iOS and Android is now very powerful, however some platforms have fallen or falling. The most glaring example is BREW and Symbian. Although there are four times more devices shipped by Symbian compared to Windows phone devices in 2012 they do now have the ecosystem to generate the kind of fire works that iOS and Android are currently enjoying. 60% of BREW developers indicates they will stop using it since its at the end of its life cycle and Qualcomm is quietly preparing for its discontinuation. Symbian has the highest rate of developer abandonment amongst all platform at 52%, especially that Nokia have declared that Microsoft is its preferred smartphone platform.

Vision Mobile mapped the performance of various OS below.

Blackberry is never far behind BREW and Symbian and is very close to becoming an endangered if not extinct platform. RIM has significant difficulties competing with iOS and Android even considering the expected release of the BB10 platform this year especially with email and instant messaging commonly available across  all platforms, Blackberry has lost its edge. As a result RIM investors are pressing the company to break up and sell all its assets. 14% of BlackBerry developers are abandoning the platform, even though the platform still brings considerable revenue to developers, the main reason being the very weak sales and market position of BlackBerry devices.

Samsung's Bada is next in line in the list of platforms being abandoned, with 49% of developers planning to drop it, it will end up to be an pure South Korean platform that is immature, substantially buggy and only limited to low-end smart phones. Samsung is losing its bargaining power towards Google's android which is now also penetrating the low cost smart phone market.

Windows Phone, the new kid on the block is the new cool: Even though  Windows Phone sales continue to disappoint, a year on, with 2.6 million devices sold in Q1 2012, according to Gartner, interest among developers continues to build up. The majority of developers who plan to adopt a new platform, plan to adopt Windows Phone (57%). Overall, 42% of developers using iOS and Android indicate that they plan to adopt Windows Phone and while the intention is slightly stronger among developers using mobile web (44%) or other, less popular platforms, intention doesn’t seem to vary significantly by the platform developers currently use.

Now there is a duopoly between Android and iOS, who will be the most dominant is still to be determined, although  Android is currently on a clear lead, there is a threat coming from HTML 5. Cross platform development is on the rise with 72% of iOS developers using Android and 64% of Android developers using iOS. The future of smart phones are pegged on this 2 giants. However for cross platform functionality HTML 5 is entering that space. This means that the choice between native applications and HTML 5 will be a cat and mouse game, where native applications will alway be in the forefront in terms of capabilities and feature set, HTML 5 will leverage in its cross platform functionalities. As Tom Hume, founder of FuturePlatform argues, “User expectations will always be formed by the native platforms, and native will always be a step ahead of HTML, as that’s in the interest of platform vendors”. He explains that “today, HTML5 performs poorly with new user interface paradigms like Microsoft’s Metro UI. Tomorrow, HTML5 will need to catch up with ambient sensing. It’s always going to be a cat and mouse game.”



The question is how will shape the ever growing smart phone market. So take your picks. As for AmanziTel being in the Customer Experience Management sphere, we support most of the platforms today and will continue to do so as long as there are consumers using this platforms. Although we have focused mostly on Android and iOS, while Windows Phone is of interest the platform is too closed for higher penetration amongst developers. How about you, will you pick one platform from the other?