iOS v. Android

It's no secret that Apple and Google are locked in a battle for smartphone market dominance. The shear quantity of Android devices available and their lower selling price should give a distinct market share advantage to Google. Similar to that enjoyed by Microsoft in the PC space.

New data published by Kantar Worldpanel and reported on by MacRumors shows the competition in the US market. Going back two years in time, Android has had the market advantage for all but a brief period after the launch of the iPhone 4S. Apple has recently retaken the lead after the launch of the iPhone 5.

Be sure to look at the chart on MacRumors to see what I think is the most interesting thing about the data. In the summer of 2011, a couple months prior to the launch of the iPhone 4S, Android market share peaked at around 67%, while iOS bottomed near 22% share. This summer, prior to the iPhone 5 launch, Android share peaked at around 59%, while iOS hit a low near 35%. That's a decrease of around 8% for Android and an increase of 13% for iOS.

The even market share point also increased from around 45% in 2011 to about 48% in 2012. 

What's interesting is the trend and how it will project into the future. The curves for both companies are smoothing. The data would suggest a market where Android is pretty dramatically losing market share while iOS is gaining it.

Improvement by Reduction

Craig Mod has written a brilliant piece about the current state of publishing. There are so many nuggets of information that are applicable in so many places, I can't possibly summarize them here. I'll give you two samples.

In product design, the simplest thought exercise is to make additions. It’s the easiest way to make an Old Thing feel like a New Thing. The more difficult exercise is to reconsider the product in the context of now. A now which may be very different from the then in which the product was originally conceived.

Newsstand is perhaps the most underutilized, under-imagined distribution tool in the short history of tablet publishing. If you squint your eyes and tilt your head at just the right angle, you’ll notice something magical about Newsstand: given the proper container, it’s a background downloading, offline-friendly, cached RSS machine people can subscribe to. For money.

There is no doubt we're going to be seeing dramatic changes to the very idea of publishing in the coming years. The coming world will be a fundamentally more democratic place than we can even imagine. The possibilities are really exciting.

Read this story.

DuckDuckGo

I've been trying to remove as much of my dependence on Google from my life as possible. One area that's really hard is search. I've been using DuckDuckGo as my search engine as much as possible the last few months, and I've mostly been very happy. Don't get me wrong, I'm a long way away from dropping Google entirely, but I'm trying.

Michael Rosenwald has written a great story about DuckDuckGo for The Washington Post. This is the story of a small guy taking on a true industry giant and trying to carve out a niche. Even if Google's privacy issues don't creep you out at all, it's a story worth reading.

“My thesis for the company was, what can we do that other search engines, because they’re big, can’t do easily?” Weinberg said. “Because what’s good for Google business is bad for Google users.”

So: DuckDuckGo does not track users. It doesn’t generate search results based on a user’s previous interests, potentially filtering out relevant information. It is not cluttered with ads. In many ways, DuckDuckGo is an homage the original Google — a pure search engine — and its use is soaring, with searches up from 10 million a month in October 2011 to 45 million this past October.

Microsoft's Treatment of It's Users

Microsoft is admittedly a late entrant to the modern smartphone market. They need to do everything right to gain a foothold against Apple and Android. The way the're treating Windows Phone 7 users is the opposite of what they need to be doing.

Paul Thurrott takes Microsoft to task today and doesn't pull any punches.

Today, almost exactly one month after the Windows Phone 8 release and over 5 months after it was announced, Microsoft has never really publicly discussed Windows Phone 7.8 again nor has it hinted at when it might be released.

Hat tip to Paris Lemon

Windows 8 Usability

Jakob Nielsen takes a very critical look at Windows 8 from a user perspective. If you're in the market for a new OS, you should read this.

I know people often want Apple to get away from the static icons on the home screen and the fast app switcher tray. That seems nice in theory, but in practice it can make usability suffer. In theory, I like the simplicity and taste Microsoft has displayed. But that elegance comes at a cost:

Icons are flat, monochromatic, and coarsely simplified. This is no doubt a retort to Apple's overly tangible, colorful, and extremely detailed "skeuomorphic" design style in iOS. For once, I think a compromise would be better than either extreme. In this case, we often saw users either not relating to the icons or simply not understanding them.

When it comes to design, I think the happy medium lies somewhere between Apple's pretty icon and Microsoft's flat one.

Hat tip to Daring Fireball