Flurry research says Amazon’s Kindle Fire overtook Samsung’s Galaxy Tabs in just a few short months

The chart above compares application sessions among all Android tablets before and after the holiday season.   For January, Flurry uses month-to-date figures, at the time this report was written.  Since Flurry was looking at proportions of use, estimating the remainder of January would not change percentages.  For an easier visual comparison, they label Amazon Kindle Fire in orange and Samsung Galaxy Tab in blue.  On the left, in November, they see that Samsung Galaxy Tab dominated application session usage on Android, with the Kindle Fire only having recently launched.   At that time, the Samsung Galaxy Time was widely considered the only viable competition to the iPad, though a distant second.  In January, after the holiday boom in devices and in apps, they see that strong adoption of Kindle Fire, combined with significant downloads driven from the Amazon App Store, resulted in a massive surge in session usage that just edges out the Galaxy Tab.  Unrounded, Kindle Fire represents 35.7% of sessions and Galaxy Tab represents 35.6%.  Remarkably, and from a standing start, the Kindle Fire overtook the Galaxy Tab in just a few short months. Total Android tablet sessions in January more than tripled over November, with Galaxy Tab sessions increasing by more than 50%.  Overall, Android Tablets are growing aggressively as a category.

Amazon Uses Its “Fork” to Eat Samsung’s Lunch

So how can a late entrant like Amazon, with little-to-no hardware DNA, waltz in and knock off a consumer electronics juggernaut like Samsung, a company that also enjoyed strong growth in 2011?  This is where Flurry believes things get interesting.

In short, Amazon’s launch of Kindle Fire had more in common with an Apple-style launch than it did with aligning with the Android system.   To date, the Android world has focused on marketing the operating system and the “power” of the devices, with quality of content and the consumer experience subordinated in priority.  With Google managing the Android Market, which lacks content control and a seamless commerce experience, inertia pushes those developers who choose to build for the platform toward advertising models.  Developers who monetize through other means tend to make less on the platform.  To ensure that it could take full advantage of its unique digital store prowess, Amazon forked the Android operating system.

Apple, on the other hand, understands that great content is the key to increasing the attractiveness of hardware.  They learned this hard way during the 1980s when an inferior combination of PC hardware and operating systems overtook Apple computers, primarily due to a lack of software.  This time around, for the iPhone and iPad, Apple created a robust economy in which developers could thrive, ensuring their allegiance to innovating for the Apple platform, ultimately making Apple hardware more desirable, and creating a rare, but powerful virtuous cycle.   To understand how well Amazon might attract developer support, we studied how well Amazon drives paid downloads in its store versus the Android Market through the Kindle Fire and Galaxy Tab, respectively.

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· Complet the content in this article: http://blog.flurry.com/bid/81151/Amazon-Lights-the-Android-World-on-Fire