comScore: Amazon Kindle Fire is 54.4% of US Android tablets
comScore shows Kindle Fire propping up Android — Amazon's Kindle Fire now makes up the absolute majority of the Android tablet platform in the US, comScore found in a fresh study. The e-reader and tablet crossover represented 54.4 percent …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Kindle Fire's rise has been quick and contested: an October 2011 report flagged early demand signals before launch, and by January Flurry was describing Amazon as having lit the Android world on fire. What makes the new comScore figure land differently is the Forrester framing from March 2012 — no Android tablet held more than 5 percent of the market against the iPad, with the Fire the open question. At 54.4 percent of US Android tablets, Amazon now owns the majority of a platform it does not build for anyone else.
Demand data had already pointed this way: a November 2011 study found 22 percent of prospective tablet buyers wanted a Fire, second only to the iPad's 65 percent. The breadth of pickup on today's numbers — VentureBeat, ZDNet, Phone Arena, ReadWriteWeb and others all carrying comScore's release — reflects how awkward the stat is for Google, since its most successful US 'Android' tablet is a heavily customized device sold as a storefront.
First-order effects
- Amazon's $199 device becomes the statistical definition of the Android tablet in the US, meaning comScore-style 'Android tablet' headlines now measure Amazon's retail reach more than Google's platform health.
- Competing Android tablet makers — absent from the top of these charts since none exceeded 5 percent against the iPad per Forrester — see their category identity absorbed by a rival ecosystem that routes users to Amazon's store rather than Google Play.
Second-order effects
- Google faces growing pressure to reassert control over what counts as Android on tablets, since the forked Fire delivers none of the search, services, or app-store revenue a true Android tablet would.
- The Fire's loss-leader economics fit Amazon's just-reported Q1 2012 pattern — net sales up 34 percent to $13.18 billion while net income fell 35 percent — pushing competitors to decide whether they can match hardware priced as a gateway to media and retail spend.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the US tablet market structurally bifurcates into Apple's integrated premium model versus Amazon's subsidized-content model, leaving conventional Android vendors squeezed between two ecosystems neither of which needs them to win.
- Market-share measurement itself fragments: analysts and press will increasingly have to split 'Android tablets' into certified-Google devices and forks like the Fire, or the headline number stops describing any single company's platform.
The trend: US tablet competition is consolidating into a two-model race — Apple's integrated hardware business versus Amazon's retail-and-media-subsidized devices — with cheap, store-locked tablets hollowing out the middle of the Android camp.