As Timthorn mentioned, a high growth rate from a small base isn't really impressive. Last year, it was on one U.S. carrier, and T-Mobile at that. Now, everyone but AT&T has it.
Aside from that, however, Android's tackling a range of devices from the high end tier to what the industry terms "feature phones," devices that hope to tackle one area and tackle it really well (i.e., photos, texting, social media). These are lower margin but higher gross, and for now, completely uninteresting to Apple but Android provides a perfect platform for crafty manufacturers to quickly churn them out.
The Nexus One is a better phone than the iPhone for the technologically adept. Apple is not uninterested; its recent lawsuit against HTC is testament to its fear.
I didn't mean Apple was uninterested in Android at all. Quite the contrary.
What I meant was that they're uninterested in the lower end, lower margin feature phone market that Android is successfully wading into with partners like HTC and Motorola. That's why we've never seen the $99, stripped down WalMart iPhone pundits have murmured about for years.
Apple obviously cares about the Nexus One and the Droid. They don't seemingly care about Motorola Backflip that Jim72 pointed out, for example.
For sure, and e.g. the media player is quite clunky, and the SD card has no standard layout. But the ability to have e.g. my todo list, or my calendar items, or a twitter feed etc. as widgets on my home screen is more tangible. And application association mechanism is useful too - I can replace the various media players, browser etc. and actions from different applications respect my wishes, rather than following some one true way. And I can get notifications and alerts from background apps - works really well for me monitoring various remote services.
Ah, I knew I was missing that! I was shocked when I couldn't recall that. And it's exactly the "social media" feature phone I was talking about. Thanks :)
Aside from that, however, Android's tackling a range of devices from the high end tier to what the industry terms "feature phones," devices that hope to tackle one area and tackle it really well (i.e., photos, texting, social media). These are lower margin but higher gross, and for now, completely uninteresting to Apple but Android provides a perfect platform for crafty manufacturers to quickly churn them out.