(Image courtesy of Silicon Alley Insider)
Don’t believe that Apple has loyal customers? Particularly in the smartphone side of the business, their customers appear to be slavishly so, if a new study is any indication.
Silicon Alley Insider is reporting that Apple’s satisfaction rate for the iPhone is insanely high -- despite the handset’s recent “Antennagate” controversy or the often-lamented network of its U.S. exclusive wireless partner, AT&T. So how satisfied are users?
According to a Yankee Group survey summarized on CNNMoney, 77 percent of iPhone owners claim they’ll buy another iPhone -- compared to only 20 percent of Google Android owners who say they’d buy another Android device again. That’s a pretty wide chasm of customer satisfaction, we’d say. Correction: CNNMoney's story was updated this afternoon with a more accurate statistic. It wasn't 20 percent of Android owners (Google-branded Android phone owners, that is -- limited to the Nexus One and G1) who said they'd buy an Android phone. It was 20 percent of the whole group of smartphone owners, a much different statistic. We regret not catching the correction for several hours.
Silicon Alley Insider’s Dan Frommer theorizes that part of Android’s lack of customer satisfaction has to do with “the half-baked state of many Android devices out there” -- while Apple’s iPhone is a single new handset updated each year, there are a dizzying array of Android-based devices that range wildly in features and user experience.
For instance, it’s hard to imagine the original HTC G1 Android device receiving the same kind of user satisfaction when compared to more current handsets such as the HTC Droid Incredible or the Nexus One, especially given the enormous strides that Google’s Android has taken since the original model in terms of features.
The reality is that Google’s Android is a fractured market, with a confusing number of handsets -- and not all of them can even run the latest and greatest version of the Android software. Compare that to Apple’s iPhone, which was updated to iOS 4 last month and is capable of running on all but the original 2007 model of the iPhone.
If Google hopes to compete on a level playing field with Apple in the mobile space, it sounds like they’ll need to work on shoring up the customer satisfaction for their Android-based devices first.
Follow this article’s author, J.R. Bookwalter on Twitter
Susie Ochs
July 26, 2010 at 6:04pm
That correction in the CNN Money post was added after we'd posted this article, and we didn't notice CNN Money's correction until now.
Even when we wrote this, the 20% figure was misleading at best because it referred to "Google Android" phones, as in phones that are Google branded. That's the G1 and the Nexus One, so that 20% didn't even include phones like the Incredible or the Evo or the Droid. So on its face it was never really a great comparison.
And now CNN Money's correction says that the figure was wrong from the get-go. It was 20 percent of all smartphone customers planned to buy an Android phone. So now the original comparison this article was based on isn't even true. (Yay!) iPhone customers want another iPhone. One-fifth of smartphone customers want an Android phone. It'd be better if we could compare the 20% of smartphone users who want an Android phone against the percentage of THE SAME GROUP who want an iPhone.
Sorry for the confusion. I've added a correction to our story above.
Pewpewarrows
July 26, 2010 at 3:00pm
Apparently checking sources is too difficult for you guys, so here it so for you:
http://money.cnn.com/2010/07/23/technology/iphone_4_att/The study never said that only 20% of Android customers would renew. It said that 20% of all smartphone customers would be buying Android phones.
I suppose it'd be silly to expect you to do a front-page post retracting this article, but I'll suggest you do anyway if you want any credibility as a tech news source.
