Apple’s iOS has turned it into the most valuable company in the world earning an astounding share of corporate America’s profits. But as a matter of technology, the popularity of Google’s Android is just mind-blowing as this Horace Dedieu chart illustrates:
He’s scaled the x-axis not in absolute time but in relative time since launch. So we can see that iOS has sold somewhat more cumulative units over the course of its lifetime, but that lifetime is substantially longer. In terms of adoption rates, iOS blew the previous entrants out of the water and now Android is setting a new even more amazing record-breaking pace. This is going to be an especially important development in relatively poor countries while mobile connectivity is generally better than wireline, so the availability of relatively cheap relatively powerful mobile devices is a total gamechanger.
