Articles I read said that the s7 had been the year's best selling smart phone. Evidence now shows that it's even harder to keep the note 7 in stock than it was the s7.
--RICH
Point 1: The S7 I'm sure is the best selling Android flagship, but the vast majority of sales aren't flagships. There aren't any hard volumes of sales by SKU reported anywhere that I know of, but here's what we can figure out based on what Google releases here:
https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html.
The S7 as an example, is considered a normal, xhdpi device. It is in a category that accounts for
15.5% of active android phones and that category also includes the S6, S6 Edge, S5, HTC 10, M9, M8, M7, etc, etc. Basically all phones with 3.5" to 5.2" (approximate) display with 480dp or higher, which would be flagships, the 1080p and 1440p devices. Technically it should fall into the "large" category because of the resolution, etc. The Note 7 is in a category that covers .
5% of active devices. The Note 7's category includes devices like the Moto Z, Moto G4, Moto XPE, Nexus 6P, Nexus 6, Note 5, Note 4, OnePlus 3, etc, etc. Big, high res screens. Ironically, the S7 Edge is also in that category. So in general there are about 30 times more "normal" sized devices than large devices.
Obviously there are also many more kinds of non flagships than flagships, so using an a fortiori probability argument, we could say that 90% of those devices are not Samsung, which would account for the giants in China, where Samsung and Apple aren't competing as heavyweights yet. This would still leave a 3 to 1 ratio of S7 type devices to Note 7 type devices out in the wild. And the S7 has an advantage of having an additional 6 months of sales during the same calendar year, so 9 months at 3 vs 3 months at 1 means we should expect to see around 9 S7's sold in 2016 for every 1 Note 7 sold in 2016.
TLDR of point 1: And again, we're talking about 16% of total devices in the category that these two devices belong to. 84% of active devices are not in either category, so the real best selling device is approximately 5 times more likely to be in one of the other categories than to be in either category that the S7 and Note 7 exist in.
Point 2: Then there is the iPhone, which doesn't have a cheap market - they only sell flagships, though some are older than others. The iPhone accounts for approximately 13% of all phone sales. All Android flagships we established are approximately 16% of phone sales. Samsung accounts for 22% of all phone sales, across all their devices ... but their biggest area of growth so far this year was in their Galaxy A and Galaxy J phones - which are borderline flagships, but not really. Subtracting Apple's 13% from the top phone makers, leaves 87%. Samsung's 22% of the total represents about 25% of the remaining devices.
To again argue a fortiori, let's go ahead and double their 25% and say that they are actually selling 50% of flagships. That gives them 50% of the 16% that represents all flagships, or 8% of all phones might be Samsung Flagships. To the iPhone's 13%. We can approximate this as 5:3. So for every 3 Samsung flagships being sold, there are likely 5 iPhone flagships being sold in the same period. This means that if we give Samsung every benefit of the doubt as far as Android Flagship sales, they're still being outsold almost 2:1 by Apple on flagships. The remainder of Samsung's 22%, or roughly 14% of all devices, would be their lower end devices.
TLDR of Point 2: The strongest case for the probability of the best selling flagship smartphone being a Samsung device is approximately one third as likely as Apple having the best selling flagship. And this is only on flagships. As established in point 1, the probability of the Note 7 being the best selling Android device are seems to be between 1% and 4%, with the probability of any Samsung flagship being the best seller seems to cap out below 10%. Given the time observation in point 1, this would lend weight to the probability being 1% or lower, despite the healthy assumptions granted to the Note 7 and Samsung via a fortiori arguments in their favor.
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