A new study suggests that the iPad will keep dominating the surging tablet market – but only until Android gets it together and substantially saturates the market by 2015.
The study estimates that Apple currently owns about 75% of the tablet market, which is expected to expand from less than 20 million units in 2010 to more than 230 million in 2015. By that time, Apple’s share of the market will drop to just 38%, due largely to the proliferation of cheaper and more advanced Android tablets.
Although Apple has dominated this space since the launch of the iPad in 2010, this is set to change with the introduction of the low-cost Android tablets, the wider launch of Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and the possibility of the major brands such as Amazon launching tablets on the OS. Apple’s iPad excels because it has lots of apps but costumers don’t get many options as far as device customization. That allows Apple to keep things universal between the iPad and its other devices running on its iOS platform, making it easy to scale up iPhone apps to the iPad. But what if users fancy a 7-inch tablet? Or prefer a widescreen video viewing area? Apple doesn’t currently provide options such as those.
It’s hard to really analyze projections like these because there are so many factors to take into account, but as it stands today, the iPad is dominant in the tablet market because it really provides a clean and powerful user experience to is customers. Apple likes to boast about its huge number of apps specially designed for iPad, stored in the App Store, and costumers picking up Android today will miss the well liked features like Netflix or Hulu. It’s still silly to think that Android will never be able to compete against the iPad just because it struggles to do so right now.
