Google's Honeycomb offensive musters just 3.4m tablets
Apple's iPad may still be sitting pretty at the top of the consumer tablet charts, but questions still remain over whether Android 3.x Honeycomb really has been a sales failure so far. Google and its manufacturer partners are yet …
Context & Ripple Effects
Honeycomb launched in early 2011 as Google's first tablet-specific Android release, but the deck was stacked from the start: at debut the platform had a tablet app catalog of just 16 titles, and Google chose to withhold the source code entirely — holding Honeycomb back to stop phone makers from porting it to handsets, a decision that signaled it might never reach mobiles at all.
The sales picture has been grim all year. The flagship Motorola Xoom managed roughly 100,000 units by April, and now the aggregate number for every Honeycomb partner combined is just 3.4 million tablets — against an iPad that still tops the consumer charts and an analyst forecast of 180 million tablets in the market by 2014. The news lands the same week Apple shipped the iPhone 4S with Siri, keeping competitive attention fixed on Cupertino.
First-order effects
- Motorola and the other Honeycomb hardware partners are carrying inventory built for a platform whose entire installed base is 3.4 million units, while their channel rival Apple sells more iPads than the whole Android tablet ecosystem combined.
- Google's decision to keep Honeycomb closed-source is now under direct scrutiny: the exclusivity play was meant to produce a polished tablet OS, and the sales figures suggest it produced neither polish nor volume.
Second-order effects
- Manufacturer partners face pressure to reposition around price and smaller form factors rather than competing head-on with the iPad's premium positioning, since the current strategy has yielded a fraction of the forecast market.
- Developers who hedged between platforms get a clearer signal: with a 3.4-million-unit Android tablet base, tablet-first app investment continues to flow to the iPad, which further starves Honeycomb of the catalog gap that has defined it since February.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds toward the 180-million-unit market analysts projected for 2014, the tablet category risks structuring like a single-vendor platform at the top with commodity Android players fighting over the remainder — the opposite of the smartphone dynamic where Android scales through openness.
- Google's next Android release becomes the pivot point: whether it unifies phone and tablet code will determine if the fragmentation that Honeycomb embodied gets resolved or entrenched.
The trend: The tablet market of 2011 is consolidating around Apple's integrated hardware-software model, exposing the limits of Google's fragmented, partner-led approach in a category where apps follow installed base.