Not necessarily.
People seem to forget (or ignore) that most of Android’s growth in the smartphone market has been a consequence widespread adoption by large incumbent handset makers, who were replacing other (smart and non-smart) mobile operating systems. This is very different from iPhone growth, which was a consequence of Apple entering a market it had never previously played in, and building up a highly successful hardware business there.
The relevance to the tablet market is obvious. In the tablet market, Apple is following the same model they followed with smartphones. They’re entering a market they’ve never previously been in, and they’re building up from nothing. We know they’re pretty good at this, because we’ve just seen them do it with the iPhone, and before that with the iPod.
The mechanism that lead to such explosive growth for Android, on the other had, is unavailable in the tablet market. There are no large incumbent tablet vendors who will simply hand Android market share. For Android to be successful in the tablet market, some of the very same vendors who’ve been losing share to Apple in the handset market now need to gain against an established Apple tablet platform.
Some people seem to be taking for granted that Android will be successful in the tablet market because it was so successful on smartphones, but when you break things down like this, it becomes clear that this is an entirely different sort of challenge for hardware vendors pushing Android. It’s very hard to say how this will turn out.
I’m not predicting this with any high degree of confidence, but I think the odds of this market turning out more like the music player market than the smartphone market are higher than is generally supposed. Like, as in, I think a lot of people believe this has virtually no chance of happening, but I’d put the odds at perhaps 30%. Maybe higher.
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