Marco.org - Too much hardware choice

> Most people don’t read gadget blogs or even know what Android is. They generally hear about individual phones, without distinguishing much based on operating system. (They don’t know what those are, either.) Marco Arment is on a roll lately. His point here about Android is spot on, as usual.

Geeks who love Android have this fantasy that the majority of Android users are like them. They aren’t. Most people who bought an Android phone last year don’t know what Android is. They just went to their Verizon store and bought whatever the salesman pushed on them. There is no Android platform. There are only many, vaguely similar phones that happen to run Android. Gather all those sales figures all you want; the long-term success of Android is far from secure, because the majority of Android users are anything but loyal to the Android ecosystem.

It’s going to be an interesting year, watching Verizon sell iPhones and Android phones side by side. I hope Verizon releases detailed enough sales statistics to give us a clear picture of how these two “platforms” stack up when put next to each other on the sales floor.