Chitika offers a very interesting chart comparing the mobile data usage of Apple’s iOS devices and Android devices in the US. iOS traffic consistently exceeds Android. Could be because iOS is a more elegant or useful platform, given that there are more Android devices in the field and iOS in the United States.
Sergey Brin, speaking to the Guardian today, sends up a warning flare regarding Internet freedoms.
The principles of openness and universal access that underpinned the creation of the internet three decades ago are under greater threat than ever, according to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
In an interview with the Guardian, Brin warned there were “very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world”. “I am more worried than I have been in the past,” he said. “It’s scary.”
The threat to the freedom of the internet comes, he claims, from a combination of governments increasingly trying to control access and communication by their citizens, the entertainment industry’s attempts to crack down on piracy, and the rise of “restrictive” walled gardens such as Facebook and Apple, which tightly control what software can be released on their platforms.
The 38-year-old billionaire, whose family fled antisemitism in the Soviet Union, was widely regarded as having been the driving force behind Google’s partial pullout from China in 2010 over concerns about censorship and cyber-attacks.
He said five years ago he did not believe China or any country could effectively restrict the internet for long, but now says he has been proven wrong. “I thought there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle, but now it seems in certain areas the genie has been put back in the bottle,” he said.
Regardless of your feelings about Google as a company, he is certainly correct in voicing these concerns.
Google Street View Car
A collection of the weird and wonderful photos from Google Street View.
According to this report from the Wall Street Journal, Google has been secretly tracking users of the Safari browser on iPhones and computers even though such users had changed their settings to block tracking.
Google Inc. and other advertising companies have been bypassing the privacy settings of millions of people using Apple Inc.’s Web browser on their iPhones and computers—tracking the Web-browsing habits of people who intended for that kind of monitoring to be blocked.
The companies used special computer code that tricks Apple’s Safari Web-browsing software into letting them monitor many users. Safari, the most widely used browser on mobile devices, is designed to block such tracking by default.
Google disabled its code after being contacted by The Wall Street Journal.
This is a company that is in the midst of a total rewrite of its privacy policies in order to allow it to compile and cross-reference information across all its platforms to create a complete data on its users. The FTC should immediately investigate whether this tracking violates Google’s existing privacy policies.
Apple stock has been on quite a tear for the past week and half. And today, as of 3:10 pm, Apple is trading at over $495 and its Apple’s market cap ($461 Billion) is greater than the sum of the market caps of Microsoft ($257 Billion) and Google ($199 Billion) combined.
Disclosure: I am long AAPL.
And that is not (merely) my opinion. It is the view of Antonio Rodriguez:
More specifically, three events in 2011 burned it [Android success] and we’re now holding on to a charred corpse that is quite different: an Android so splintered that it will make the glass on your Galaxy Nexus S2 Prime Pie dropped on concrete look like an ice skating rink.
The three events: 1. Google buying Motorola and alienating all of the tier one handset makers (none of which to this day have the spine to state it publicly but all of which have now come up with their “plan B”), 2. Microsoft extracting licensing fees from these same handset makers in the form of IP indemnification and 3. Amazon shipping a wildly successful, yet unidentifiable, version of an old Android build over the holiday… and making it a wild success. Of the the three, #1 was completely avoidable but the other two may just have been the name of the game when there is so much at stake in the fight of who paints the interface for the next generation of computing.
…
It not a particularly well-kept secret that when WebOS was in its death spiral, HP would happily pay developers to port any application which had shown traction to their platform. To my knowledge the Android tier one handset guys have not done this yet, but given a little time it may become a reality. There will still be all sorts of headaches involved, and you might be better off taking the love from Microsoft, but in a world of several warring Androids, you are the scarce commodity. Though the more popular splinters such as Amazon’s will likely never have to pay for developers, especially given the fact that with only one Christmas under their belt, they are already outperforming the standard Google Market in terms of downloads for some app categories, the rest will, probably in inverse proportion to how valuable they will be to getting you users. And in the meanwhile consider them non-dilutive equity financing sources.
Read the entire piece. Not good news for Android, but he promises another post on iOS which is said to provide warnings for that side as well.
I think he is onto something with a very clear explication that goes beyond the typical “Android as a platform is splintered” claims that many make.
And there is this:
The iPhone 4S, along with cheaper older models, has helped Apple close the distance on Google’s Android, drawing within a few percentage points in recent smartphone sales market share in the U.S., according to the NPD Group. In a CES telecom fact sheet, the research firm said that iOS has zoomed up to 43 percent of sales in October and November, compared with 26 percent in the third quarter. Meanwhile, Android’s share dropped from a high of 60 percent in the third quarter to 47 percent in October and November.
By the way, the same NPD survey said the top three phone models were the iPhone 4S, the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 3GS.
Whatever you think about the above, one thing is clear: RIM is not the walking dead. It is the inert, immobile, and truly dead.
There are exciting, nail-biting day ahead for investors, my friends.
Disclosure: I am long APPL.
Well, if you look at the numbers, it is a good question. MG Siegler takes a look.
The three largest Android OEMs are Samsung, HTC, and Motorola. Samsung just posted record quarterly profit. So far so good. But HTC just reported its first profit drop in two years. And Motorola just warned that its 4th quarter sales were going to miss as well. When you have to warn ahead of actual earnings, that’s a very bad sign.
So one of the three top Android OEMs is doing well. The other two are doing poorly. This matters because of what it means for the future.
If OEMs aren’t actually making much money as a result of Android, why would they keep using it? Well one reason is if Google buys you, as is happening with Motorola. But what about HTC? You can bet they’re asking themselves this question.Every OEM in the industry is looking at Apple and drooling when it comes to profits. (Making money is what matters at the end of the day for a company after all.) That includes Samsung. If you actually read the story about their record profits, you’ll note that a large part of those profits is a one-time gain from selling their hard-disk drive business. The phone business may be doing very well, but you can bet those profits are not Apple-level profits.
Disclosure: I am long APPL.
Google Android fans and promoters continue to call the Android operating system “open” in contrast to Apple’s iOS.
But how open is this?
Google Inc. says Verizon Wireless is keeping it from building its new mobile payments application into a new line of smartphones powered by the search giant’s Android operating system.
Verizon, which is pushing a competing mobile payments platform, will begin selling the Galaxy Nexus this month. But the smartphone, developed by Google and Samsung Electronics Co., but it won’t include the Google Wallet, a payment and rewards app that is key to Google’s attempt to tap the local-business advertising market.
And, while we are on the topic of Android, some of its openness leads inexorably to huge security risks.
Business competition can generate strange bedfellows and here is a good example. According to an article in The Daily, Microsoft is busy working on bringing Microsoft Office to the iPad (and a new version of Office for the Mac). Given that Microsoft is planning to launch a touch-based tablet operating system as a major part of Windows 8 sometime in 2012, why would they want to help Apple sell more iPads now?
The reason seems clear: to better compete with Google by weakening the attraction of the Android platform, while simultaneously using the huge number of iPad users to mount an assault of Google Docs, which is a direct competitor to Office. Further, Microsoft Office is a huge seller on the Mac and therefore is actually a major generator of revenues for Microsoft. Finally, establishing an Office beachhead on the iPad is way for Microsoft to hedge the risk that their own tablet efforts fail to generate significant earnings.
Interesting times.
Which is more secure: Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android.
Security-researcher Dr. Charlie Miller has a strong opinion: iOS is better hands-down.
(Via Zero Day Blog)
Disclosure: I am long AAPL.
I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.
– Steve Jobs, as quoted in the new biography Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. The book goes on sale Monday. Click the link to pre-order from Amazon.
Andy Rubin
I don’t believe that your phone should be an assistant.
– Andy Rubin, co-head of Android software development at Google. I think that millions of iPhone 4S users already disagree, less than a week after launch.
(Source: The Joy of Tech)
(click image to embiggen)
$12.5 billion is a lot of money.
– Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer, commenting on the cost of Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility.
Disclosure: I am long Apple.
