Forrester: No Android Tablet Has More Than 5% Share vs iPad. How Does Amazon's Kindle Fire Compare?
On the eve of what may well be the launch of a brand new iPad from Apple comes some new analysis from Forrester Research on the current competitive landscape in tablets — or lack thereof, as the case seems to be.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Kindle Fire arrived in late 2011 amid inflated expectations: an October report cited leaked sales numbers suggesting it was on track to outsell the iPad, while a November survey found 65% of prospective tablet buyers still wanted an iPad against 22% for the Fire (Electronista's buyer-preference study) — two signals pointing in opposite directions.
Forrester's March 6, 2012 analysis lands on the side of the preference data: no Android tablet, Fire included, clears 5% share against the iPad. Coming on the eve of an unconfirmed but widely expected new iPad launch, it reframes the Fire less as an iPad killer than as the leading member of a fragmented also-ran field — which is why Bloomberg, PC Magazine, PC World and DigiTimes all picked it up the same day.
First-order effects
- Amazon's Fire is repositioned by the numbers from iPad rival to largest slice of a sub-5% Android cohort, putting pressure on the 'Fire is outselling the iPad' narrative from the fall's leaked figures.
Second-order effects
- Android tablet makers outside Amazon face a squeeze: with none holding meaningful share, they must either match the Fire's subsidized price point or concede the low end, while Apple's imminent refresh threatens to widen the gap at the top.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the tablet market consolidates into one dominant integrated vendor plus discount hardware attached to retail ecosystems — making unit-share metrics less useful than ecosystem and content attach rates for judging who is actually winning.
The trend: Tablets are bifurcating into a single dominant premium platform and price-subsidized challengers, with analyst share measurements increasingly arbitrating which challenger narratives survive.