IDC: Android now leads the tablet market with a 56.5% share

There were more Android-based tablets shipped in Q1 2013 than all others combined, and here's why that matters

The Q1 2013 numbers from IDC, a technology and telecommunications research firm who keeps track of this sort of thing, show that Android tablets now lead the market with a 56.5-percent share. The 27,800,000 units shipped in the quarter is a 247-percent improvement from this time last year, when just 8,000,000 units were shipped. It's important to note that this increase doesn't come at the expense of Apple, who shipped 65.3-percent more tablets in Q1 2013 than they did in Q1 2012 -- it shows the market is growing, and the lions share of new purchases are Android.

These sorts of numbers make CEOs and people who count pennies pretty happy, and will be the fuel for fanboy wars across the Internet, but why are they important? I'll tell you why -- because the available selection of applications designed for Android tablets sucks.

Google keeps telling developers exactly how to build their app to take advantage of the real estate on a tablet, but because there weren't that many out there, nobody listened. Sure, there are some really great applications done "right" and look fabulous on our tablets, but most of them are just the phone version blown up to fill the seven or ten inch screen on your tablet with unused white space. Have a look at iPad apps, and you'll know exactly what I mean.

Hopefully, with more Android tablets being sold than any others, developers will take notice and change this. You simply can't afford to ignore over half the market, and we saw what happened when Android took the phone market away from everyone else. I'm looking for big things now that we can no longer be ignored.

Source: IDC

Via: IDC: Android now leads the tablet market with a 56.5% share