Apple flunked math

During the last Apple announcement Steve Jobs made some interesting claims:

1. the iPod touch is outselling the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP combined
2. Android might have 200,000 activations a day, but Apple is activating 230,000 devices per day

Right away both of those numbers should have set off some alarms. First off, the Nintendo DS alone has sold 132 MILLION units, making it the bestselling video game platform of all time, compared to Apple's ~125 million iOS devices. The Sony PSP itself has sold more then 60 Million units, and I don't know anyone who actually plays that thing. Anyway, it's pretty clear that Jobs was basing his claim on some arbitrary and undefined period of time of their choosing (but since when is that new?).

On the activation front it's also clear, and becoming clearer, that Apple was fudging the numbers. I've personally wondered if the iPhone sales numbers (on a per day basis) weren't abnormally hiked by the initial release of the phone. They sold 1.7 Million phones in the first 3 days of sales, enough to goose the average up for quite some time. Now a site, which was reblogged by AppleInsider, MacRumors, and Gizmodo, has indicated that a significant portion, over 1/3, of iOS devices sold are iPod Touches. A commenter on Gizmodo went ahead and did some basic math and estimated the current sales rate of iPhones to be just around 100k units per day, i.e. a sustained rate 1/2 that of Android.

A lot of people and fanboys will say "so what?", trot out arguments like the iPhone is a single device on a single network, or take up Jobs' spurious claim that Android activations include updates/upgrades. The fact of the matter is this: Android is growing as a platform and its rate of growth exceeds iOS's, and if you remove non-iPhone devices and Android appears to be outselling the iPhone at a 2-to-1 rate. The iPhone's biggest competitive advantage, the App Store, will stick with Apple for some time, at least another full year until Android irons out its SDK issues (especially for gaming). But after that point, and after some of the App Store momentum slows down, I predict more and more developers will be looking at the rapidly expanding Android user base and decide to invest more of their resources with that market. Time will tell. But if current trends are any indication Android will only benefit from a little more time.