Amazon’s Kindle Fire owns a third of the Android tablet market
We have recently seen various measurements that claim the Kindle Fire is becoming quite popular, but due to Amazon's reluctance to ever release numbers we didn't know quite how popular. So, it came as something of a surprise when research firm Flurry released their numbers on the tablet's adoption over the holidays.
According to their data, drawn from application installations, the Fire jumped up 33 percentage points in two months to claim a market share tie with Samsung's Galaxy Tab line. As the Galaxy line consists of all of Samsung's tablets, from 7-inch to 10.1-inch, this is quite an accomplishment. However, while it looks in these graphs that the Fire is eating up Samsung's market share, in fact the Android tablet market has simply grown over the holidays, albeit thanks mostly to the Fire.
The Kindle's growth has been attributed mostly to its dirt cheap $199 price, which is certainly a big part of why people like it. Still, even though I personally wasn't fond of it, I think that Amazon's superb integration and focus on content and user experience got people interested who would have never considered an Android tablet otherwise.
There is no doubt that the Kindle Fire is contributing greatly to the rise of the 7-inch tabs, but the long term effects of Amazon's experiment are still unclear. The customized UI and experience may be winning over users now, but the fragmentation of the Android platform has the potential to cause problems later on.
[Flurry via Ars Technica]
