Market researcher at Informa Telecoms & Media predicted in a new report that Android sales will outstrip iPhone by the year 2012.
While the first iPhone devices hit the market in June 2007, Apples latest iPhone 3G hit the stores last July, only a few months before Google released the new Android open source OS platform and the first device supporting it the T-Mobile G1.
CNet also reports
However, London-based Informa believes Symbian’s switch to open source will help the Symbian Foundation maintain its leadership over Android, Linux, and Microsoft over the next few years.
Nearly 162 million smartphones were sold last year, surpassing laptop sales for the first time, according to Informa. The market researcher forecasts that smartphone penetration will reach 13.5 percent of new handsets sold this year and that the figure will reach 38 percent by 2013.
A while ago, Android Market opened for paid sales. While this finally opens opportunities for Android developer to get some money for their efforts, there are some serious problems currently.
One reason for this is bad performance and downloading problems, as well as problems with the copy protection features as you can read in the official Android Developers Google Groups. There are actually reports, that the copy protection feature can corrupt the APK files which will cause Exception when the application is launched. You can find this and other concerns of developers in the “Think twice before turning on the Copy Protection" option!” discussion on the Android Developers group.
It seems, that this is especially the case if users are installing a copy protected version of your application over an old non-protected application.
The another reasons developers worry, is about the slow/low sales of their paid applications. One of such worried developers is “Ed Burnette”, author of of “Hello, Android”.
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Android Market: Developers worried about bad sales
