Recent data published by market research firm comScore has revealed that Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet hold the top spot in the Android tablet market as of February this year, beating out the next in line by almost 40% of the market share.
According to the data the Kindle Fire accounts for 54.4% of the Android tablets in use with the Samsung Galaxy Tab, the second on the list, accounting for 15.4% of the total. The third tablet, the Motorola Xoom, holds on to 7% of the market, a number that has been steadily declining. The remaining 23.2% is divided among the other candidates on the list with the Asus Transformer, Toshiba AT100 and Acer Picasso making up the bulk of the percentage.
The Kindle Fire has been creeping up on its market dominance, rising from 29.4% in December 2011, and this has prompted questions about Google’s hold on the Android platform. Amazon uses its own variant of the Android OS and its current hold on over half the market means that it would make sense for app developers to support the device, possibly at the expense of utilising Google-owned functions and features.
A competing, competitively-priced tablet using vanilla Android would need to see release to prevent the Kindle Fire from chipping away at development cash that might be spread a little further otherwise. Several other manufacturers are already eying the low-cost tablet segment that the Fire currently dominates so there should be some interesting times (and deals) ahead.
Source: Ars Technica