For B2C Apps - iPhone is not the only game in town

iPhone is a popular phone, there is no doubt about it. Let's start with some numbers: with 8.4 million phones sold in Q3 of 2010, and similar numbers for the prior two quarters, there are a lot of iPhones out there.

Now for some more numbers. According to a story on TechCrunch, there are currently 200,000 Android phones being activated per day. Using some very basic maths, which is admittedly going to lead to some inaccurate results, that equates to roughly (((52 / 4) * 5) * 200,000) 13 million units a quarter. 

13 million Android activations at Google versus 8.4 million phones sold by Apple. With that number of units being activated per quarter, Google's Android platform is not to be ignored.

Now lets take a look at growth. Over the last year, iPhone sales have gone up 131%. Over the last three months Android sales have gone up from 100,000 units a day in May 2010 to 160,000 units a day in June 2010 and are now at 200,000 units a day. That's a growth of 200% in three months. Whether this a significant impact on the earnings of Google is a matter for debate. Search is their business and more iPhone sales means more search, as does more Android sales.

If you are a B2C company looking to provide services to your customers while they are on the move, the iPhone is not the only option available to you. With sales of Android phones experiencing such a phenomenal growth rate, when you are building apps for your customers, they are as likely to be carrying an Android phone as an iPhone.

The smartest companies have already figured this out of course. Facebook recently updated their Android app.

While some forward thinking companies like Starbucks are pushing their brand out into the mobile space to communicate and interact with customers, it is common for these companies to limit themselves to the iPhone platform. With the growing popularity of Android phones these companies are missing out, and even putting off a large part of their customer base by ignoring the Android platform. There is an anecdotal demonstration of this on the Starbucks blog with frequent calls for an Android version of the Starbucks apps in the comments.

So for the moment, our brand perception instinctively makes us think of iPhone as the obvious priority when app development is mentioned. But the numbers are starting to show that you should be prompt about following the release of your iPhone app with an Android version.