In recent years, the fight for the connected living room has heated up with products such as Apple TV, Roku, Google TV & Google’s latest incarnation: Chromecast. In this budding ecosystem, there is no doubt the tablet has started to, and will continue to play a crucial role. Looking ahead, it is the central device that we’ll likely be using as the remote to control our television, as the dial to turn up our thermostats, and as the search engine to browse & stream short videos and music. With so much at stake, it’s no wonder that Google and Apple are adapting their respective Android and iOS platforms to become the brains of our living room. This begs the question: Which platform, Android or iOS, has the upper hand?
Today, we had the opportunity to observe and analyze Black Friday tablet purchases in real-time. Our U.S.-based panel of Android & iOS users submitted over 90,000 shopping trip receipts within the day, giving us plenty of data to work with. As we noted in our previous posts (here and here), iPads are this year’s hottest commodity. To our surprise, however, we found that roughly 40% of Black Friday iPad purchases could be attributed to existing Android smartphone users. This discovery clearly poses a challenge for Android moving forward and heightens the importance of Chromecast as Google competes for mindshare in the living room of the future.
Stay tuned as we continue diving in to tablet purchase data & monitor the sales of Google Chromecast and Apple TV throughout this pivotal holiday season…
