Top Android news of the week: Shipments drop, Android Wear not big, royalty battle ends
In the world of Android this week was news of Android shipments dropping, Android Wear shipments were not heavy, and Microsoft/Samsung end the royalty battle.
An analyst firm reports that shipments of Android devices fell quarter-over-quarter for the first time ever in Q4 2014. There were 217 million Android products shipped in the previous quarter and only 206 million in the fourth quarter.
This is significant as the holiday quarter is traditionally very good for products in the mobile sector. The analysts blame high fourth quarter sales of the iPhone for the drop in Android shipments.
The suit against Samsung over royalty payments for Microsoft's patents has been settled. It involved payments to Microsoft that Samsung had stopped paying due to claims that the former's purchase of Nokia's handset business was a breach of the royalty agreement.
Neither company disclosed terms of the settlement.
Android Wear ships 720,000 units in last half of 2014
Research firm Canalys reported that shipments of Android Wear smartwatches were less than impressive, with 720,000 devices shipped in the last half of 2014. While not terrible performance for the young Android Wear platform, this performance was not stellar as it involved several OEMs.
Canalys points out that in comparison to Apple's iPhone numbers over the same period, Apple shipped almost as many iPhone 6 and 6 Plus units a day as Android Wear devices over the entire six months.
Stability of mobile platforms is crucial given the heavy use of devices on the go. Crittercism, mobile app management specialists, report that Android Lollipop apps are slightly more stable than those on iOS 8.
According to the report, Lollipop had a 2.0 percent app crash rate compared to 2.2 percent for iOS 8. Perhaps more importantly, Lollipop had a lower app crash rate than earlier versions of Android.
