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Flurry: China's surpassed US in iOS and Android activations, but not smartphone install base (yet)
Color us unsurprised at the notion that the world's most populous country would one day be home to the greatest number of smartphones. That hasn't happened quite yet, but we're getting close per analytics firm, Flurry, who's measured China's surpassed the United States for the first time in combined iOS and Android activations in March. That's quite a difference from the beginning of 2011, when China held the 10th spot in the firm's rankings, before admittedly rising to an impressive second place by the end of that calendar year. And as you'd expect with growth trending in China's favor, it's now only a matter of when, not if, before it snatches the smartphone install-base crown from the current king, the US of A. But before jostling amongst yourselves on exactly when that'll happen, we'd recommend hitting that source link for a chart-filled run-down. Go on, it's fun for the whole family.
Study: iOS apps crash more than Android apps do
Mobile OS crash analysis firm Crittercism (Really? Who's naming this stuff?) has posted the chart above, which shows that as a percentage of crashes overall, the latest version of iOS claims the highest total. In fact, many versions of iOS show a large percentage of crashes, and clearly iOS overall seems more prone to have an app crash rather than Android. Of course, there are quite a few qualifiers here. This data has been normalized, so we can presume that this isn't just a quirk of the numbers: There are likely more crashes happening on iOS devices than Android devices, and not just because there's more iOS apps being used (Crittercism says it monitored about 215 million app launches across all platforms, and there were three times as many launched on iOS, but again, this chart shows a percentage of all app launches). So why more crashing? Crittercism suggests it's because iOS 5.0.1 had just released, while the latest version of Android had not yet arrived, and the new OS was causing more issues than usual in Apple's system. I would also suggest that iPhone users (who have likely paid more for their phones) tend to overtax their devices -- keep in mind this is just an app crashing, not the full iOS, and we've all done that once or twice, right? And as you can see, there's a fair amount of crashes on older iOS phones, which means customers might be running newer apps on older hardware, almost always a recipe for disaster. At any rate, interesting figures. With so much more usage on iOS devices (both from skilled and not-so-skilled developers, and users of both types as well), it's not that surprising that there are so many more crashes. Have crashes on iOS seriously affected your user experience?
Steam releases Mac stats, share drops to 5%
Steam has released its latest hardware survey results, and there's both good and bad news for us Mac gamers. The bad news first: Mac usage of the gaming service has apparently leveled off since the big debut a few months ago, and while the Mac share was originally around 8%, it appears the novelty has worn off a bit, and Mac usage has fallen down to about 5% of the total Steam audience. That's not too surprising (don't forget that the service kicked off with a free Portal game and a good amount of publicity), and it's important to remember that 5% of Steam's 25 million users is still a significant audience. It'll be interesting to see if Apple ever takes advantage of that -- we haven't heard a single official word from them yet about Steam coming to our platform, although the Snow Leopard Graphics Update was tuned to clear up issues that Valve reported. The good news, however, is that Valve has separated out Windows and Mac stats in the hardware survey, so even though there are a few less percentage points of people to look at, we have a lot of interesting information about those Mac users. As you can see in the graphic above, the majority of them are actually playing on a MacBook Pro -- iMacs are the next biggest model on the list, but represent 25% of Mac users as opposed to the MBP's 49%. Steam is also promising a list of most commonly installed Mac applications, but as of this writing, that information isn't posted quite yet. Unfortunately, while Steam is installed on a wide variety of Windows computers, I'll bet that it hasn't quite reached widespread adoption on the Mac side, so these stats will be specifically for Mac gamers rather than the Mac audience as a whole. But it's always interesting to see what stats come out of the Steam Hardware Survey, as a snapshot of just what our technology profile looks like. [via Joystiq]
The app market, by the numbers
The very insightful Stuart Dredge over at Mobile Entertainment has compiled an amazing primer on all of the numbers behind the app market (which you can also see by clicking the "Read More" link, although it's not viewable on an iPad or iPhone). If you want to know anything about how many apps are rolling out of the store, how many apps are installed on the average device, or what kinds of apps those are, Dredge's presentation will tell you. It's a really excellent compilation of everything we know about the App Store and the app market at large thus far. I don't think anything here is new or really that surprising. We already know that Apple is, by far, leading the race on number of apps (both created and sold), and we've heard before that games tend to do very well on the marketplace in a number of demographics. The end of the report has some great numbers, too, on standout applications like Angry Birds and the eBay app. Otherwise, it's basically a big round-up of a lot of the stats that we've heard so far. But having them all in one place gives a nice overview of just how big this little software ecosystem has become.
Apple market share climbs to 6.8% in Europe
Hardmac is reporting that Apple's market share in Europe has risen to 6.8%. That's not quite as high as the around 10% share for computers in the US, but it is a full two percentage points higher than it was last year. Windows still dominates in the EU, with 92% of all computers running some variation of it. Most of the growth in Europe has come from OS X Intel computers, but the iPhone and the iPod touch have contributed about half a percentage point as well (not to mention that interest in the iPhone almost certainly drove some Mac purchases, even if we can't see that directly in the data). It'll be interesting to see what happens with the iPad release this weekend; while Microsoft's Windows clearly has a solid grasp on the market, you have to think that the iPad will probably put a dent in some of their sales, especially netbooks and even some notebooks. In another year from now, Europe may be on pace to match up with the US share soon.
Phat Loot Phriday: Zod's Repeating Longbow
Reader Matthias C. wrote in with a special request to see this item here, so here you go. Name: Zod's Repeating Longbow (Wowhead, Thottbot, Armory) Type: Epic Bow Damage/Speed: 541-887 / 2.80 (255 DPS) Attributes: +34 Agility, +51 Stamina On equip: Your ranged attacks have a 4% chance to cause you to instantly attack with this weapon for 50% weapon damage. This one's interesting -- the tooltip actually says the chance to hit. It's not the first time that's happened, but plenty of tooltips will say "a chance of" proccing rather than mentioning the actual percentage. %Gallery-33600%
Apple's US market share still falling and rising with the tides
Yesterday's prelim 4th quarter report was great news for Apple's health as a manufacturer of personal computers - they shipped over 1.6 million Macs, the most ever in a quarter and 30% more than the previous quarter. Today's news of a rise to 6.1 percent market share in the U.S. from Gartner, however, has the Mac web doing the market share dance all over again, as just a year ago this month it was the NPD Group reporting that Apple's U.S. market share - excluding online sales - had risen to 6.6 percent. The confusion ensues when considering MacNN's conflicting report from Gartner claiming Apple's U.S. share just rose to 6.1 percent. Of course where and how these different groups are getting their numbers is unbeknownst to this blogger, but methinks something might have been lost in translation between all these analysts.Still, while market share numbers might be getting a little fuzzy as of late, we can at least trust Apple's announcement of selling the most.Macs.evar in a quarter, and that's alright with me.
