Animoca Data: Most Popular Android Tablets Worldwide (Feb 18 – Mar 20, 2013)
Our series about the most common Android smartphones and OS versions in each country generated numerous requests for specific data (yes, we’ll get to Europe soon!). One of the most frequent requests was to issue something on the tablet market. In this post we’ll break down the most popular tablets wordwide. You can check out our other posts describing individual Android smartphone markets: Hong Kong & India | Singapore | USA | Japan.
One in four Americans now owns a tablet device, according to Pew Research, and analyst firm IDC reports that the worldwide tablet market grew more than 78% year-on-year in 2012. IDC predicts that 190 million tablets will be shipped in 2013, with a forecast 48.7% growth over last year.
So with tablet sales not slowing down any time soon, let’s see which Android tablets are currently the most popular on the Animoca network of Android users.
All data obtained from individual users of Animoca games worldwide who played an Animoca game on a tablet device between February 18 and March 20, 2013.
Top Android tablets worldwide (Animoca network, Feb 18 – Mar 20, 2013)
Error margin: +- 0.1%
Sample size: 978,000
Assumption: there are 75 million Android tablets in circulation worldwide
Immediately you’ll note that 4 of the top 5 tablets, and 6 out of the top 10, are of the smaller variety, featuring 7-inch screens. This should come as no surprise, given that one in every two tablets shipped last quarter had a screen size of less than 8 inches.
Once again we note the prominence of Samsung devices; apparently, the Korea-based company dominates tablets as well as smartphones. Next up, the Amazon Kindle and Kindle HD account for more than 12% of the tablets on our network – quite remarkable for devices that are still not globally available. The popular and zippy Google Nexus 7 came in 6ᵗʰ place, suggesting that Google will be a significant player in the hardware wars.
Once we account for Samsung, Amazon, and Google, the rest of the field is wide open. After the top 7 tablets, the devices claiming under 1% of the Animoca Android network became too numerous to list here. In fact, given an error margin of 0.1% and the slight differences between tablets in 8th place and onwards, we cannot be entirely sure of the correct ordering.
What we can be confident of is that tablet sales won’t slow down any time soon, and that developers should be creating mobile apps built to suit their users. Knowing which tablet or tablets you are developing for is useful knowledge – not only screen size, but also other hardware specifications.
When we looked at Japan we saw what seemed to be a preference for one-handed gaming on smartphones being used in portrait mode; perhaps the popularity of 7-inch tablets has something to do with a similar global trend. Of course, it could just be that the 7-inch tablets strike an ideal balance of price, portability, and form factor.
Join us next time for more Animoca data, and be sure to follow us on Twitter for additional insights!