iPhone & Android loyalty implications

What is interesting about this image beside the fact that the majority of both iPhone and Android will make the same choice on the next purchase? The implications of course.

For the foreseeable future the rapid growth among these two platforms will not come at the expense of one another, but at everyone else. Android isn't winning iPhone users over, and neither is the iPhone. Well not in significant numbers anyway.

These are the only two hot platforms on the market and they will continue to grow rapidly until the other competitors either catch up or a limited to a niche corresponding to the specific specific advantages and demographic. For RIM that will be only those customers who have made a continuos choice to get a Blackberry for its form factor and focus on email.

While the 80/70 % loyalty split implies the above prediction, the 14/7 % are much more interesting to talk about. Interesting because these is a market contradiction in there. It should be the established player that should be loosing more of its customers to the new guy, not the the other way around. And it is as far as number goes. But as percentage of users, it is not.

When the iPhone originally came out, it was the new guy on the block. It offered less features to its competitors but for those people that had the right features, it was the absolute #1 choice. People using it claimed 90% brand loyalty.

Let me let this sink for a moment: Right now twice as many people as a percentage of the Android platform plan to get and iPhone as compared to iPhone users who plan to try out Android. And because the iPhone has been the establishes player, those 7% of iPhone users are not likely dissatisfied but just willing to explore something different. The Android users on the other hand have been probably just ended up with an android handset and found out, that its does not measure up to the hype and there are a lot of issued you discover after purchase.

This statistic is interesting in a way that if Android and iPhone were the only two platforms on the market with a 50/50 split, the iPhone would start to gain on the Android by adding twice as many users than its loosing.

In other words, if this keeps up, whatever market share Android gets eventually, Apple will be able to surprises it on the long run through the better user satisfaction.