Android Grabbed 26.9% of Global Tablet Market in 3Q11, iPad 66.6%

Posted on Friday, October 21, 2011 by MegaZone

Asus Eee Pad Transformer with keyboard For the third quarter of 2011 iPad, unsurprisingly, dominated the tablet market with a 66.6% share. Android came in second with 26.9%, according to figures from Strategy Analytics. At first glance that seems like a dominating win by iPad, but compare those numbers to a year prior. In 3Q10 iPad had 95.5% of the market, and Android only 2.3%. Android has been grabbing market share rapidly, at the expense of iPad. Though the overall market grew 280% in that year’s time, growing from 4.4 million units to 16.7 million, so neither side is exactly losing. Together iOS and Android dominated with 93.5% of the market.

What about the rest? Windows came in a distant, distant third with 2.4% of the market on 400,000 units shipped. Which double’s RIM’s 200,000 Playbooks shipped. 500,000 other tablets shipped, many of those likely WebOS TouchPads HP dumped on the market.

With the TouchPad out of the market and the Playbook stagnant, and Windows 8 tablets still a ways off, iOS and Android should take even more of the market this quarter. And Android should take more market share from iOS as more Android tablets hit the shelves, not the least of which will be the $200 Amazon Kindle Fire. Well, if you can really call it an Android tablet given how heavily customized it is.

Via The Register.

About MegaZone

MegaZone is the Editor of Gizmo Lovers and the chief contributor. He's been online since 1989 and active in several generations of 'social media' - mailing lists, USENet groups, web forums, and since 2003, blogging.    MegaZone has a presence on several social platforms: Google+ / Facebook / Twitter / LinkedIn / LiveJournal / Web.    You can also follow Gizmo Lovers on other sites: Blog / Google+ / Facebook / Twitter.
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  • Fanfoot

    Yup, surprisingly good numbers actually, given how much crap Android tablets are taking in the press.  Looks like Apple has good reason to fight Samsung in the courts now, and can reasonably say there is a real risk of market impact if Samsung’s ‘clones’ are allowed to continue.  Certainly as Android improves, this competition is going to get more fierce.  And as you say I would expect the Kindle to ship a seriously large number of units the holiday quarter unless Amazon has some kind of supply issue…

    • Fanfoot

      http://gigaom.com/mobile/1-in-4-tablets-from-last-quarter-run-on-android-hmmm/

      did the usual analysis and suggests the 4.5M Android tablets is more likely 3.4M or so if you only count ‘sold’ units rather than shipped, which would drop the percentage a few points.  Doesn’t really change anything though.

      Does look like we’re going to have some problems in this space soon in terms of how to count OS’s.  The current numbers for example include the Nook.  And Chinese knockoffs running forked OS’s.  And will presumably include the Amazon Kindle, which don’t have access to the Android marketplace.

      Should they?  What should count and what shouldn’t?  Should the Kindle Fire be listed separately?  What about if they really really fork it and it starts to support API’s that aren’t compatible with Honeycomb etc?