Google’s Android platform now represents 17.2 percent of the global smartphone market, overtaking Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iOS as the world’s third most popular smartphone OS and edging past Research In Motion’s (NASDAQ:RIMM) BlackBerry to emerge as the top-selling OS in the U.S., according to new data published by research firm Gartner. Worldwide sales of Android-powered devices topped 10.6 million in the second quarter of 2010, up from just 756,000 a year ago, at which time Android made up only 1.8 percent of the global smartphone market. "A non-exclusive strategy that produces products selling across many communication service providers, and the backing of so many device manufacturers, which are bringing more attractive devices to market at several different price points, were among the factors that yielded its growth this quarter," said Gartner research vice president Carolina Milanesi in a prepared statement.
And Android’s momentum keeps growing: Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently said sales of Android smartphones now total about 200,000 each day, up from 100,000 a day just a few months earlier. "People are finally beginning to figure out how successful Android is," Schmidt said during an appearance at Lake Tahoe’s Techonomy conference earlier this month. "It looks like Android is not just phenomenal but incredibly phenomenal in its growth rate. God knows how long that will continue."
So where are all the Android applications? According to a survey published in June by cross-platform development solutions provider Appcelerator, 81 percent of developers say they are very interested in creating apps for the Android platform, not too far off from similar enthusiasm for Apple’s iPhone (90 percent) and iPad (84 percent) and significantly ahead of interest in rival operating systems like BlackBerry, Windows Phone and Symbian. Even so, the Android Market storefront presently offers anywhere between 70,000 and 90,000 apps (sources vary), a far cry from the 225,000-plus available in Apple’s App Store. How can the numbers be so lopsided?
August 16, 2010 — 9:43pm ET | By Jason Ankeny
Read more: Android adoption surges–so where are all the apps? – FierceDeveloper http://www.fiercedeveloper.com/story/android-adoption-surges-so-where-are-all-apps/2010-08-16#ixzz0wykDD500
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