Android phone returns eroding sales gains?

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So many Android handset the reason for returns?

Some Android phones are better than others, at least to consumers who are reportedly returning them at a rate of 30 to 40 percent.

That figure is based on an unnamed TechCrunch source, "a person familiar with handset sales for multiple manufacturers," and led Phandroid's Kevin Krause to write, "Yes, we can believe that some Android handsets are getting returned at a rate nearing 50 percent, but not Android handsets as a whole." 

Because there are so many Androids out there — dozens from the likes of Motorola, HTC, Samsung and LG, just to name a handful — there is apt to be just as much variance in quality, while there is only one handset for Apple's iOS, the iPhone. In contrast, the iPhone 4 had a 1.7 percent rate in returns (51,000 phones out of about 3 million) at about this time last year.

Safety in numbers for Android, which propelled it to the top of smartphone sales at the beginning of the year, may also be its undoing, especially as the iPhone continues to spread to other carriers.

TechCrunch's John Biggs says that to the "average" phone user, "Android is a maze." (Cue the inevitable back and forth between fanboys and Google plussers, and carry on in the comments below.)

We'll keep looking for back-up for those return rates, but here's one CEO, Motorola's Sanjay Jha, who does seem to blame Android for his company's handset returns:

70 percent of all smartphone returns tend to be for software reasons. We're beginning to understand now what has been going on ...  One of the good and problematic things about Android is that it's very, very open, so anyone can put third party apps in the marketplace without any testing process. There is a way of taking malicious applications off the marketplace, but generally for power consumption, for CPU utilisation, for some of those things those applications are not tested.

We're now beginning to understand the impact that has. Remember Android is really, truly multitasked, so you can run 64 parallel applications at the same time, and it has an impact on consumer experience. We're beginning to understand why 70 percent of the devices are coming back — because they're downloading third party applications and the impact that has on the performance of the device."

(Thanks, Mobile-Device.biz for its transcription of Jha's remarks at a technology conference in June.)

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