L. M. Lloyd

This is what Apple is really good at, forwarding the perception that they are the market leader, by playing the press. They take whatever single data point makes them look good, bundle an entire media event and press blitz around it, mix in a little bit of half-truth or outright lie, and run with it. For example, they have one good week of sales, in America, where the iPhone sold better than any other single model of phone, and immediately start a marketing campaign centered around the idea that the iPhone is "the best selling phone." Since no one else putting out press releases trumpeting their weekly sales figures of single models in single markets, and the press doesn't report weekly on the sales of devices, unless someone happens to call their attention to it in a press release, the press decides that what Apple says must be true, and from then on it is covered as "the best selling" iPhone. This gives the public and developers the impression that the chart above should have Mobile OS X at the top of the list, rather than fourth. The problem is, the press is a lot easier to fool than the public. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I think mainly it is an issue of the fact that the public is made of all sorts of people from all walks of life, who live all over the world, while the press is made up entirely of a certain kind of person, who lives a certain kind of life, and moves in certain circles. I can say from personal experience that living in Hollywood, you could easily be forgiven for thinking that 80% of all phones sold must be iPhones, because that is sure how it looks in any restaurant on Robertson. If I hadn't been to Tokyo or London, I probably wouldn't have any reason to question the assertion that the iPhone is the best selling phone mankind has ever seen, because you have to look hard in LA to find anyone who doesn't have one.

The problem is, that LA, NY and SF are not the world, as much as they might think they are, and if a developer or content provider wants to maximize the possibility of return on their investment, they can't afford to develop just for the people in those three cities. Yet that is exactly what is happening. Developers and content producers, who hopefully have better things to do than read marketing research reports and analysis, read the occasional tech blog, and get a level of reporting that basically amounts to "Apple tells me the iPhone is the best selling phone in the world, and all my blogger friends have them, so it must be true." They then figure that if the iPhone is the hot new phone, then that is where they should devote their development resources, and as such, limit themselves to 8% of the potential market. This is neither good for the market as a whole, nor good for the developer. In fact, the only one benefiting in all of this is Apple. who gets revenue from your app, gets to use your app to advertise how their phone has something no one else does, and gets to use the number of people who have bought their bogus claim that they have the best selling phone, as further proof of that very same bogus claim. Pretty soon you are in the all too familiar position as regards Apple products, where everyone "who matters" all agree that Apple products must be the best, because everyone "who matters" uses nothing but Apple products, while the rest of the world just goes on with their lives using non-Apple products.