It is comical how much of a competition it is for iOS zealots to be #1. I’ve read I’ve still never seen a single person using one in the wild, so I don’t think it’s helping Samsung sell tablets, which is a perfectly fine metric for measuring growth [/sarcasm], and, oh, one of my favorites was how Apple won simply because people are “copying” them. You can Google the past few years and see many of these arguments change. It seems the common thing to do now is dissuade readers into believing the stats don’t matter because You cannot compare Android to an iPhone. That’s comparing an operating system to a hardware device, like we’re not smart enough to know it means “Android-based Smartphones vs iPhone”. It is all an interesting game of checkers. There seems to be a thread flowing through all of these common posts: losing matters.

Does there need to be a winner? If so, how do we measure it and will that measuring stick be the same next year? At first it was by sales [back when I used an iPhone 3G], to which the iPhone killed Android, but the tide changed and Android is murdering iOS in marketshare so now the focus is on profit share. Gruber of Daring Fireball actually summed it up quite well, if you pull out only this part:

It’s easy to pick and choose the numbers you want to back up the theory you prefer. So if you’re rooting for Android to dominate the industry, it is tempting to focus on unit sale market share, and to attribute Windows’s historical dominance to its massive unit sale market share. But you can flip that around, and argue that because I am rooting for the iPhone, I cherry pick the data to fit the story I want to see unfold — and so I say profit share is what matters, not unit sales, only because that’s the figure that puts Apple’s position in the best light.

That is exactly what’s happening right now. Gruber falls off in the same post though:

But I like the odds that I’ll be proven right. Money is how you keep score, because it’s the one thing whose value everyone agrees upon. That’s what money is.

Google builds an open-source OS [meaning free] and the comparison is the dollars they get vs the dollars Apple gets from the iPhone? Color me weird but if you want to compare money, add up every dollar of profit from every Android manufacturer and compare that to Apple’s iOS profit share. Either way…if Apple wins that fight, iOS users shouldn’t feel great unless they are getting their dough back in stock. You’re paying more than is necessary and Apple is raking it in!

Point is…why is winning so much of a focus? You can take a site like Android Central and find an occasional joke at an iOS device embedded in a post about Android but look at their sister site TiPB.com and you’ll find numerous negative posts about Android news. It feels almost cultish, where the leader(s) continuously use negative “advertising” for that which they feel could cause their flock to stray.

Android users aren’t free and clear from dumb arguments either. It is the Windows vs Mac argument, no one will win it, but I increasingly see ignorant posts by iOS zealots trying to find that winning metric or reason why Android sucks just to make themselves feel better. I never see an Android site bashing iOS at every corner.

Use what works for you. My mom just got an Atrix [wanted it over the iPhone, which was my suggestion to her] and she’s loving it, even though it is too complex for her [came from a flip feature phone, never had or used a smartphone]. She can get on the web, Facebook, and call people. That’s all she wants and needs. To her, Android is winning.

Winning is relative. Deal with it.

Here is my absolute favorite. The Kindle Fire is selling like hotcakes and ChangeWave did a study on tablet purchases for the holiday. Andrew Wray posted this on TiPB:

Interestingly, it looks like the Kindle Fire may be eating away at Android tablet demand even though Android tablets have been on the market for some time now, which could be an added boon for Apple.

Ummm…Kindle Fire IS Android, no matter how much it is skinned or what is “missing”. HTC Sense, Motoblur, Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color tweaks, etc are all skins and they count as Android but a hot product like the Fire isn’t because it is missing the default Android “experience” [market, gmail, etc]. 😀 I love it. Great try but Kindle Fire sales will count as a part of the Android tablet marketshare and profit share, when the number game comes up again.

What’s great about Wray’s post is the exact same post showed up on SplatF earlier that day and here is the title: Kindle Fire purchase intent already at one-third the iPad’s level. Compare that to Wray’s title: Consumers want the iPad over Kindle Fire for the holidays. Gotta love it.

I believe this picture sums up the slant I see from iOS zealots vs Android zealots vs sites like The Verge [my favorite tech blog] who tell you what is without the slant.

They simply refuse to lose.