◼ TECHNOLOGY Bloomberg Businessweek August 12, 201922
*2019 IS AS OF JUNE. DATA: STATCOUNTER● Mobile operating
system market share2009 2019*AndroidOther
iOSTHE BOTTOM LINE Android’s unique synthesis of powerful
partners made the smartphone one of the fastest-adopted
inventions ever. It’s unlikely to happen again.most recent available, was 54%. Almost all those
800 million people use smartphones, not PCs, to
go online. Apple was successful in China, too, but
about 9 of every 10 smartphones sold in the coun-
try run on Android.
In India, the fastest-growing major smart-
phone market, Android devices account for 99%
of units sold, says Counterpoint, and the Android-
like KaiOS is the next-most popular for internet-
connected phones. This pattern has been repeated
around the world. The iPhone arrived, but Android
grabbed the biggest share of buyers and made the
smartphone a mainstream tool like nothing before.
Last year smartphone sales volume was more
than nine times what it was in 2008, the year after
the iPhone came out. It took a quarter-century for
annual cellphone sales to hit 1 billion. Smartphones
got there much faster, rocketing past 1.5 billion a
year before a recent sag in new-device sales.
Android has come with downsides, of course,
for its key triumvirate and the rest of the world.
The same qualities that made internet-connected
mobile devices so thrilling for more than a decade—
eliminating gatekeepers, making information
instantaneous, and connecting people with differ-
ent points of view—now feel threatening to democ-
racy, public safety, and our mental health. Samsung
and other Android partners have also increasingly
sought to free themselves from Google by pushing
their own apps or software features ahead of those
in the standard Android bundles.
And for Google parent Alphabet Inc., Android’s
legacy has grown messy. Last year, after a long
investigation, European Union regulators declared
that Google’s offering Android for free but
with strings attached was a violation of EU anti-
monopoly laws. The EU also fined Google for favor-
ing its web shopping service ahead of rivals and
for hurting competition in internet search ads. The
company is appealing all three actions.
The smartphone is now middle-aged by the
sped-up standards of the tech world. IDC esti-
mates that sales of the devices will decline in 2019
for the third straight year. There remains a big gap
between the 50% of the world that uses the mobile
internet and the 80% to 90% where analysts predict
adoption will top out. But reaching the next 3.5 bil-
lion to 4 billion people gets progressively harder.
Even Android can’t drive phone prices down low
enough for some people and places where the
smartphone hasn’t spread widely.
And as technologists bet on what lies beyond
the smartphone, the odds are that Android or an
Android-esque system won’t have a major role. In
a future in which wireless connections are so fastand cheap that the internet can be built into every
car, desk chair, thermostat, virtual-reality device,
and pair of glasses, a single gadget that acts as an
access point for the digital world may be much less
important. And the biggest platforms for cloud
computing, driverless cars, and voice-activated
digital assistants are proprietary systems, not open
coalitions like Android.
They have an example in that regard. Even with
a minority share of the world’s smartphones, Apple
captures the vast majority of profits among smart-
phone manufacturers, and loyal iPhone owners
buy billions of dollars of additional Apple hard-
ware, apps, and internet add-ons each year. So
while Google’s OS blankets the globe, Jobs’s phi-
losophy may yet win out in the next generation of
gadgets. For better and worse, the future of com-
puting probably won’t look like Android—an open,
democratizing, somewhat uncontrollable technol-
ogy that rules the world.�Shira Ovide
Ovide is a tech columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.● A startup’s robot sailboat just returned from
Antarctica with some troubling climate cluesLike The Odyssey,
But for Drones
The robot sailboat is called #1020. It’s a lackluster
moniker for a machine that just spent seven months
battling its way through 12,500 miles of frigid, mas-
sive waves to circumnavigate Antarctica. The robot,
made by startup Saildrone, is the first of its kind to
complete the harrowing journey. More important,
it’s the only scientific vehicle to have captured such
a detailed environmental picture of the state of the
Southern Ocean, bringing back data that could be
key to our understanding of climate change.
Scientists have long viewed the Southern Ocean
as a major carbon sink, meaning it pulls carbon
dioxide out of the air and pushes it deep under-
water. About 40% of the 2.5 billion tons of carbon
the ocean absorbs every year is thought to make its
way into the waters around Antarctica, says Bronte● The aim is for
the fleet of drones
sailing the oceans to
eventually total1,000