Android’s Hype Cycle: Will Netbooks Revive It?

July 2nd, 2009 by Apurba Sen

Filed under Gartner Hype Cycle, Google Trends, Trend Spotting Behavior, Trends Review, brands perceptions, buzz word, google, trends

It’s almost the time to review Android . We reported earlier that Google’s announcement on Android raised lots of doubts & ambiguity over the web. Moreover this much touted “iPhone 2.0″ competitor demonstrated relatively low effect on web.

Last September T-Mobile launched the world’s first Android-powered mobile phone in partnership with Google & recently the software giant expected that around 18-20 phones from 8-9 manufacturers on the market worldwide will be based on the Android operating system.

Riding on the hype Android’s US market share on mobile OS surpassed 6%, its application store hosted around 5,000 applications (in comparison to Apple’s 50,000-plus) until this happened at the Computex Taipei electronics show in May 2009 :

Gartner announced Android running on devices was “snappy” & stopped endorsing the platform saying that Android is a work-in-progress. However, backed by the strong Google brand Android may be an alternative to Windows in Netbooks.

We have attempted to put in place the evidences for the hype cycle curve for Android & in the absence of a perfect measure we have relied on proxies to derive the Y axis of the cycle as ‘Expectations’. We used Google Trends (US search volume) as an indicator of shared interest & Android’s OS share in US market as an indicator of market penetration & real progress.
Androids Hype cycle -Trendsspotting

So what can be learned from this Android graph and its “Expectation” measure ? Android appears to have had a plateaued growth to the peak of inflated expectations – followed by a quick fall since May end when its mobile OS market share nosedived to less than 1%. Possibly that’s an indication of Android approaching the trough of disillusionment.

Research firm Strategy Analytics have previously suggested that Android will be running on about 12% of global smartphones by 2012. Another estimates from IDC suggests that netbook shipments will grow from 11.4 million in 2008 to 22 million in 2009, a potentially massive growth area for Android.

Will Android find its slope of enlightenment & subsequently its plateau of productivity via netbooks growth (or smartphones) that remains to be seen, possibly when we revisit this trend again in future.