Why is Android different?
There’s lot of talk about the numbers from Black Friday. Twitter and Facebook didn’t fare well, mobile was up and iphone destroyed Android. Horace at Asymco asks the obvious question about the last stat: Why?
This I consider to be a paradox: Why is Android attracting late adopters (or at least late adopter behavior) when the market is still emergent? We’ve become accustomed to thinking that platforms that look similar are used in a similar fashion. But this is clearly not the case. The shopping data is only one proxy but there are others: developers and publishers have been reporting distinct differences in consumption on iOS vs. Android and, although anecdotal, the examples continue to pile up.
He’s not satisfied with the idea that android has a different demographic profile because of how many people own them now. So what could it be?