Great post and great presentation. It hits home with some activities we are working on at Symbian. I would welcome the chance to speak with you some time in the next week or so and get your take on what we are doing right and wrong.

Thanks!
Laura

Always nice to have the numbers behind the numbers. Solid work, appreciate it. And I agree with you that it’s not the number per se that are important, however it’s always good to know that there are more than just speculation behind it.

Thanks again!

the stats in my presentation have research behind them, but what I emphasize during the presentation is that exact numbers are not important, only the order of magnitude.

The “educated customers” calculation that many people find fascinating is a more of thought game: although I think that multipliers are in the ballpark, you should replace them based on your own research and more detailed analysis. For example, that simple illustrative multiplication doesn’t take into account joint probability: people who have flat-rate data plan are more likely to know about applications. In the presentation, I’ve used a rough rounded estimates to highlight the fact that this is a thought game.

That said, here is some explanations for stats. Information is collected from various sources. There is probably commercial reports costing 1000 quids that give you similar information, but they don’t usually take into account a brutal reality of developing and supporting several branches of an application for older versions of a platform.

20M iPhones: Apple said in January that 17M iPhones have been sold.

40M iPhone OS devices: there isn’t good information about amount of sold iPod Touch. Some estimates say that it’s 1.5 times higher than iPhones. According to some studies, lower bound is 4 million, but that’s clearly too low, for example in AdMob’s internet access stats, iPhone has 11% market share and iPod Touch 7.4%. (I’ve covered AdMob stats earlier, see http://dirtyaura.org/blog/2009/01/05/worldwide-mobile-internet-usage-stats-nokia-biggest-but-iphone-growing-fast/)

140M S60 devices. There are around 200M S60 devices sold in total, but it’s not practical for an application developer to target all of them, as supporting older S60 2nd ed devices requires considerable amount of work (different APIs, different graphic formats, …). S60 3rd edition is a practical target. Estimates are that there are over 100 million S60 2nd ed devices. That would leave only 100 million for 3rd ed, but I erred on the safe side and estimated it to 140 million.

30M Blackberry devices. RIM has sold over 50M Blackberries, but again, it’s not cost efficient to support old models.

1M Android devices. Probably higher today.

40M Windows Mobile devices. Collected from various sources, no good estimates available. What is suspicious that people don’t seem to use them that actively. (See e.g. AdMob stats)

1B Java-enabled devices. There’s even more sold Java-enabled phones, but talk to any Java ME developer and it’s nigh to impossible to support even a good percentage of them. 1B is “an order of magnitude” figure.

About multipliers:

Flat-rate or comparable, usable data plan penetration is somewhere between 0-10% globally. (M:Metrics studies estimated that 15% US subscribers have any data plan, compared to 5% in Europe) iPhone is usually sold with a good data plan. For illustration purposes, I used 1.00 as a multiplier, although right figure is probably something between 80 and 90%.

Knows about apps -multiplier: 32% of iPhone OS owners have downloaded an app, compared to 4% on other smartphone platforms according to ComScore surveys.

Loads of interesting stats. Just one question, from which source have you recieved the platform statistics?