A colleague who recently returned from China told me he bought an iPad in a market for $50. He then said it really just looked like an iPad but was actually running Android. He thought it was terribly funny to see a different OS on hardware than originally designed, as if he did not realise the irony. Proprietary RISC hardware running proprietary UNIX was supposedly behind us. It felt like he was showing me that he was able to buy a mainframe or midrange system cheap and run Linux on it. How funny, except I thought we were long past that point in technical liberation.

Then I noticed reports saying Android is “embedded”, far ahead of Apple iOS numbers in China.

…since many of the products were embedded with Android system, this system took the lion’s share in the market in 2011, occupying 51.1% of the market; secondly, the market share of Symbian system has been decreasing constantly. However, the system is still the second largest mobile operating system in China at present; thirdly, other smart operating system shared balanced market share, far lagged behind the abovementioned two major operating systems.

Apparently this is no exception nor a local/national situation, as illustrated by Lookout in an infographic that shows Android growth surging past Apple.

The numbers look global but they do not specify. They also do not mention that Nokia Symbian phones are still far ahead. The Economic Times gives a little more perspective.

Smartphones make up less than a third of industry volume. Nokia has also been working on a new Linux-based software platform, code-named Meltemi, to replace its Series 40 software in more advanced feature phones, industry sources told Reuters.

The Series 40 platform has been used in more cellphones than any other software, reaching a cumulative total of 1.5 billion units a few months ago. Meltemi would enable a more smartphone-like experience on those simpler models.

With that in mind, I wonder if the graph above should look more like this?

That’s still a lot of Symbian left to decrease. Could the Linux distribution Meltemi (ancient Greek for “summer wind”) blow in before the others get there? It’s certainly interesting news that a Linux option is being developed to appeal to an S40 upgrade market. It begs a question of strategy. Apple could find itself squeezed from both the high-end and low-end of the market by Android and Linux phones that run on a wide selection of devices and share applications.

At the same time Nokia has introduced a Windows phone version of their N9 hardware (called the Lumia) into the American market for $99. Apple will be faced not only with the squeeze by open operating systems and a rapidly growing decentralised app market but even those consumers who want a proprietary experience have an alternative to iOS.

All that being said I am most interested in the big security question: who will try to differentiate the privacy story in the fastest-growing markets with complex threat models. I mean, if you are one of the hundreds of millions of women trying to run a small business, what mobile system will you trust more with your business and personal secrets? A Pakistani woman on a Chinese carrier, for example…will she trust iOS?