The Android juggernaut is unstoppable: Accenture research

Based in Ireland, Accenture is one of the largest consulting firms in the world. From time to time, the company releases studies or surveys focusing on technology market and mobile computing, offering precious insights into the evolution of the complex world of technology.

One of Accenture’s most recent presentations took place at MWC (Mobile World Congress) and focused on Android’s growth rate compared to Apple’s progress over the past few years.

Back at the MWC, Accenture mobility analyst Lars Kamp presented several interesting charts that speak volumes on the evolution of our favorite mobile operating system. Due to lack of space and my reluctance to bore you with too much statistical data, I am only going to focus on three of those charts.

First of all, what we have below is the shares in the total smartphone market, which, as you can see, has been dominated by Android ever since 2010. Google’s operating system runs on half of today’s smartphones, while Apple’s iOS only powers about 30% of worldwide devices.

The past two years have seen a booming success for Android in terms of market share, and we have no reason to believe that things will change anytime soon. What could change, however, is the placement of the second runner-up, which, right now, is no competition for Android or Apple. We know that Microsoft has big plans to attack the smartphone market and its potential success could transform this two-horse race into a more tight and interesting competition.

The second chart shows the acceleration rate of the number of Android activations per day. This is pretty impressive too and, as far as I’m concerned, is actually more impressive than the first chart, as you can easily see the number of activations per day doubling over 12 short months.

300k new Android devices were activated each day in January 2011 and, while that was impressive enough, in December last year, the number had more than doubled, to a whopping 700k per day. Wow! Just wow!

Last, but not least, I would like to say a couple of words about the graph you can check out below, showing the evolution of Android’s code base over a period of three years and a half. Needless to say, this chart gives yet another sample of Android’s greatness, as the operating system’s code base has grown from 3.6 million lines to no less than 17.1 million, from August 2008 to February 2012.

This shows the enormous amount of work that Google has undertaken over these past three years and a half, which clearly makes the latest Google OS versions more complex and feature-rich than Apple’s iOS. Sure, that can be both a good and a bad thing, but such a discussion would take us all day, so, for the time being, let’s focus on the good parts.

Those were the three charts from Accenture’s presentation I considered the most important to discuss, but there are a few more that might interest you, so I will post these as well. Enjoy!

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