Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, Phil Schiller has spoken out about the fragmentation of the Android market and the difficulty Apple believes users have replicating the features offered by iOS devices.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, the day before Samsung is due to launch its highly-anticipated Galaxy S4 smartphone, Schiller said that fragmentation in the Android market, caused by devices shipping with different versions of the OS was ‘plain and simple.’
‘When you take an Android device out of the box, you have to sign up to nine accounts with different vendors to get the experience iOS comes with,’ Schiller added. ‘They don’t work seamlessly together.’
Schiller’s comments were made shortly after research firm IDC said it expected Android tablets to account for more than 50% of the market this year. If that happens, it will be the first time since the iPad launched in 2010 that it has had less than 50% of the market.
Schiller’s response: ‘I’m not sure that the estimates and the modeling accurately gives an accurate picture of it all.’
Samsung has been trailing the S4 launch for weeks with promo videos and a dance performance in New York’s Times Square. The phone is due to launch in New York later today.
Apple won’t comment on future products and reports have had it launching both a smaller, cheaper, and a larger iPhone in 2013, along with a successor to the iPhone 5. That may arrive as early as April or as late as October, depending on which rumours you choose to believe. The larger iPhone, at least, appears unlikely in the near future. Schiller told the Wall Street Journal that ‘the reason that people are making their devices bigger is to get up to the battery life the iPhone 5 offers.’
