WingNews logo WingNews GitHub [2]
top | item 2897672

Android 95.2% market share in South Korea

68 points| bane | 14 years ago |reddit.com | reply

34 comments

order
[+] sjwright|14 years ago|reply
I suspect that a major cause for people to ditch their iPhones will be to do with availability of Korean-translated and Korean-localized apps.

Now that Android has been given a comfortable lead, local developers won't even bother writing or porting local apps for iOS.

Language and cultural siloing is the reason non-English-Western markets can be so dramatically different to English-Western. If anyone wonders why Samsung is investing so much energy into Bada, it's because they want to try and win the OS race for themselves, and there's still few Asian markets where the opportunity still exists.

[+] Tsagadai|14 years ago|reply
I seriously doubt the accuracy of these stats. South Korea's web services are largely insular and just for South Korea. It well known that foreign websites have much smaller market shares of pageviews and users than domestic Korean sites. There is a Korean clone for almost every major website presently available and they are usually made by existing, large Korean companies with advertising and media budgets to get numbers away from foreign competitors. Given the deliberately isolationist nature of so many internet companies here, you cannot get accurate stats for usage unless you have their stats.

I know this is anecdotal but the majority of people I see on the bus have iPhones. iPads are probably on par with Android tablets though. iPhones are huge here. Almost everyone has or wants a smartphone which usually means an iPhone mainly due to the perception of Apple as a luxury brand and luxury brands being so overwhelmingly popular.

[+] nextparadigms|14 years ago|reply
The market share doesn't seem to be for total user base, but for new sales. So even if there is a user base of 40% iPhones there, it's declining fast and trending towards 5%, because the sales for last month show 5% iPhones sold and 95% Android phones sold.
[+] stevenae|14 years ago|reply
Very interesting, thanks for the insight. I want to note that there is still value to this data. Although the coverage may not be accurate (covering all users), it sounds like it is precise (covering a very specific subset of users that access foreign sites, which StatCounter tracks). The fact that these users have moved so dramatically to Android in just 13 months says something.

Is there a pro version of StatCounter that gives absolute figures, to see if there has been a dramatic change in tracked users over this time period?

[+] bane|14 years ago|reply
I know this is anecdotal but the majority of people I see on the bus have iPhones.

I noticed virtually the same last time I was there in 2010. But one thing I'll never underestimate is the power of trends in Korean purchasing patterns. Once something gets popular, everybody has to have it, no matter what it is.

[+] dave1619|14 years ago|reply
Having some background with Korea and living there, I also strongly doubt the accuracy of this report.
[+] dave1010uk|14 years ago|reply
PPK (of QuirksMode) breaks down these StatCounter mobile browser share stats and explains them in his blog post here: http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2011/08/mobile_brows...

Also of note, this month Android jumped past Nokia into 3rd place globally and Opera is close to losing its lead.

What's strange is that last month Nokia's Symbian had the largest share by OS globally.

PPK also has some country-specific breakdowns for Q2 of this year here: http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2011/08/q2_2011_mobi... that shows that in the UK (where I am), BlackBerry is in the lead.

When developing mobile apps or sites that have a global market, it's important to realize how varied the mobile OS and browser landscape is.

[+] cageface|14 years ago|reply
What's more interesting is that, at least according to that graph, iOS market share has gone from 40% down to next to nothing in less than a year.
[+] InclinedPlane|14 years ago|reply
That's likely the market growing and diluting iOS' market share.
[+] chaz|14 years ago|reply
The original source: http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-KR-monthly-201007-20110...
[+] bignoggins|14 years ago|reply
I was just in Seoul a few months ago and I saw about equal numbers of iPhones vs Androids. And as a mobile developer I pay extra attention to these type of things =)

The percentage of people who even have smartphones in SK seems far higher than the US. It's difficult to find anyone without an iphone or android.

[+] rmc|14 years ago|reply
Anyone got an authoratative link as opposed to a link to a reddit thread which links to an imgur.com screenshot of this supposed results?
[+] mathattack|14 years ago|reply
This highlights how much iPhone is tied to local carriers. South Korea is a market leader in mobile technology. Making it there means a lot in terms of the global marketplace. (Then again, I used to say the same thing about Japan.)
[+] rjd|14 years ago|reply
No it reflects national pride.

Samsung and LG are both Korean, and I bet that 95% figure is mostly those two companies.

[+] pointyhat|14 years ago|reply
That's internet-browsing phones share.

I reckon there's still two orders of magnitude more Nokia Series 40 handsets out there in the wild. Especially in places like China.

Still in the UK, there's a surprising number of Series 40 handsets floating around on the streets, even helf by owners of HTC's and iPhones "incase they go wrong".

[+] mikerhoads|14 years ago|reply
What is even more impressive is that there are only a few active cell phones in North Korea that aren't Android powered.