Just because you can, doesn't mean you will

Android drives growth in smartphone adoption in Europe, 
where the number of smartphone owners has grown by 44% since last year.

This little piece of data was published yesterday and has been taken as confirmation of both the market demand for Android devices and end users' willingness to embrace smartphones. Finally, some say.

But does this really tell that story?

We know that the market share for Android devices is growing fast - and that they outnumber iOS devices, but that market share seems under-represented in usage statistics for mobile web and apps, at least for the millions of individual users we see hitting pages on our clusters every month.

Consider this: Go into a phone store and take a look around. We do this frequently (doesn't everyone?). You're hard pressed to find non-Android devices these days, and Androids are certainly the devices being pushed at the point of sale, especially for operators that are not in Apple's good favor.

So people who just need to replace their old phone are much more likely to be guided towards an Android device than any other device available, and that does not mean they wanted one in the first place - or that they wanted the feature set you get with one.

So they're not necessarily going to use it - at least initially.

So we don't think that this represents a stampede towards smartphone features per se, or Android in particular, we think this is like the shift from CRT TVs to flat screens - these days you get a flat screen because there are no other options.