Barnes & Noble might not be in a good mood today but Amazon is probably celebrating (so should B&N). The app analytics firm Localytics has just released a new snapshot of the global Android tablet market and Amazon has cleaned up.
According to the little bits of tracking code that Localytics’ app developer partners have been inserting into their apps, Amazon can now claim a 33% share of all the Android tablets now in use.
In the world.
Localytics’ data showed that the majority of Android were owned and used in the US (59%), and that nearly all of the Kindle Fires were also located in the US (89% of 33%).
These figures are far from a complete view of the tablets in use, but if you take them with a grain of salt then there are a few things we can learn. For example, Google is hot on Samsung’s heels. The Nexus 7 represents 8% of the Android tablets in use, while Samsung’s Galaxy family accounts for 9%.
![global-android-tablet-share[1]](http://www.the-digital-reader.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/global-android-tablet-share1.png)
And then there’s the surprising detail about the Nook hardware. These enhanced ereaders (NC, NT, HD, HD+) now represent 10% of all tablets in use. I will admit to being very surprised; this raises questions.
I wonder if perhaps B&N’s strategy of having frequent discount sales on refurbs may have boosted the number of tablets sold without actually getting the devices into the hands of the high spenders. The discounts pursued the budget market and the subsequent digital revenue could reflect that.
In any case, I don’t put all that much weight in this data. It doesn’t quite jive with other similarly inexact sources like Chitaka’s ad network. Chitaka reported earlier this monththat the Kindle Fire, Galaxy tablets, and the Nexus 7 all gained market share after the holidays. The Nook family of tablets were generating so few impressions that they weren’t included in the chart.
You can take either set f data however you want, but I choose to be skeptical of both.