Messaging: Mobile’s Killer App – stratēchery by Ben Thompson Another good read from Ben Thompson. He argues that messaging is the “killer app” of mobile. This pairs well with the observations of Ben Evans who has been pointing out just how many of these messaging apps are achieving a huge scale. 

Two Bears, Revisited – stratēchery by Ben Thompson Excellent article by Ben Thompson. He revisits his earlier (also excellent) two bears article to show how those two fears – one for Apple, one for Samsung – started to come true last quarter. 

Android instability Ben Evans with a blog post of something he first phrased in the Cubed podcast – a contrast of ecosystems from the point of view of PC vs Android vendors. Amongst Android vendors, only Samsung is making money and they have to feel awfully unsure about what the next 2-3 years could bring …

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comScore Reports December 2013 U.S. Smartphone Subscriber Market Share Android saw its share dip slightly (-.3%) but remained on top with a 51.5% share. Apple gained 1.2% and stayed in second place at 41.8%. Third-place BlackBerry declined .4% to 3.4%, narrowly beating Microsoft’s 3.1% share that declined by .2%. Nokia closed out the top-five list with …

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Android Platform Distribution Numbers The rollout of the KitKat update by carriers and device manufacturers continues to be slow at 1.8%. The latest numbers reveals that the adaption rate of Jelly Bean, which was first released back in July 2012, increased from 59.1% to 60.7%.  

Mobile app developers’ interest in HTML5 is slipping Appcelerator and IDC found the number of developers who said they were very interested in building apps on HTML5 had fallen to 59.9 percent. This was the lowest level since Appcelerator began tracking the specification in April 2011. “Interest in HTML5 peaked in July 2012 at 72.7 …

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Apple ends 2013 with 41.8% US smartphone share, Samsung hits 26.1%; Android back to losing share comScore’s latest results are in and it’s mostly a continuation of what we’ve been seeing: Apple and Samsung gained share. Everyone else lost or was flat iOS gained 1.2 percentage points of share, Android dropped (and has been dropping …

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Ecosystem maths Excellent “back of an envelope” analysis of Apple and the ecosystem of iOS against the larger backdrop of the entire smartphone/tablet market and Android. Benedict expands on this in one of the recent Cubed podcasts where he said “Apple and Google have both won the smartphone/tablet ecosystem wars in that they both pretty …

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