27/02/2012 - Mobile Internet is here and geared for growth, despite the global recession. For 2016 the worldwide penetration rate of Mobile Internet will reach 34.7% - or 2.89 billion users - generating service revenues (apps and advertising) of 43.3 billion EUR. IDATE has published a report dedicated to the mobile Internet providing its readers with detailed information about market's structure, data & forecasts 2008-2016, player profiles and strategies. It also spotlights the current and upcoming trends and the different kinds of mobile Internet usages.

“Since the introduction of the Apple App Store, the focus in the mobile Internet has been mainly on the ‘Battle of the OS’. This is now seemingly all but over, with Apple and Google in a victorious duopoly. The scenario has now shifted to the ‘Battle of the platforms’, with players such as FaceBook and Amazon, who do not own an OS, joining the fray, and who are providing alternative platforms which aim to bypass the native OS system”, says Soichi Nakajima, senior consultant at IDATE

Focus on the tablet market

It is just recently in 2010 that the tablet market started growing with the introduction of Apple iPad. In 2010, around 19 million tablets were sold, 16 million of them by Apple, which even in 2011 remained the clear leader.

Contrary to the smartphone market where Android has reached a leader position, the tablet market is still by far dominated by one manufacturer. Apple indeed has the advantage of being the first mover and different factors have hindered any significant growth by Android.

• Even when the Android Honeycomb was released, the Tablet OS was still a beta version, which found it difficult to compete with the already mature iOS. Because of this beta status of Android for tablets, Google only distributed the OS to selected partners. This resulted in some manufacturers launching products powered by the smartphone version of Android. This also led to voices being raised against Google for not respecting the Open Source agreement that tied it to the developer community. Although several improvements were gradually brought to Honeycomb, the next version of Android, known as Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0), should bring more maturity to the system.
• The delayed and restricted release of Honeycomb along with its associated SDK did not help, leading to a lack of available apps adapted to tablets. While Apple App Store and Google Android Market are more or less on a par on the smartphone segment, they are still worlds apart in terms of tablet specific app catalogues. As of end Q3 2011, the App Store
• referenced 140,000 different iPad specific apps while there were comparatively few of them on the Android market
• The fact that the tablet is a new segment has enabled other tablet operating systems to gain some visibility, such as QNX OS that powers RIM Playbook or WebOS which powered HP Touchpad devices. Although these tablets were not hugely successful, they brought differentiated user experience in a world where it is very difficult to differentiate oneself in the Android ecosystem

In the near future, it can be expected that Apple will gradually lose its market share as their competitors gradually come up with better counter-offers. What happened on the smartphone market will be repeated on the tablet market, although probably at a quicker pace. On the smartphone market, it took two years before competitors started having true ‘iPhone killer’ products. For tablets we expect Android to pass iOS in terms of sales in 2013. One big question mark is related to legal disputes on the market for patent infringement issues.