Tablets

Despite its success on smartphones, initially Android tablet adoption was slow.[190] One of the main causes was the chicken or the egg situation where consumers were hesitant to buy an Android tablet due to a lack of high quality tablet apps, but developers were hesitant to spend time and resources developing tablet apps until there was a significant market for them.[191][192] The content and app "ecosystem" proved more important than hardware specs as the selling point for tablets. Due to the lack of Android tablet-specific apps in 2011, early Android tablets had to make do with existing smartphone apps that were ill-suited to larger screen sizes, whereas the dominance of Apple's iPad was reinforced by the large number of tablet-specific iOS apps.[192][193]

Despite app support in its infancy, a considerable number of Android tablets (alongside those using other operating systems, such as the HP TouchPad and BlackBerry PlayBook) were rushed out to market in an attempt to capitalize on the success of the iPad.[192] InfoWorld has suggested that some Android manufacturers initially treated their first tablets as a "Frankenphone business", a short-term low-investment opportunity by placing a smartphone-optimized Android OS (before Android 3.0 Honeycomb for tablets was available) on a device while neglecting user interface. This approach, such as with the Dell Streak, failed to gain market traction with consumers as well as damaging the early reputation of Android tablets.[194][195] Furthermore, several Android tablets such as the Motorola Xoom were priced the same or higher than the iPad, which hurt sales. An exception was the Amazon Kindle Fire, which relied upon lower pricing as well as access to Amazon's ecosystem of apps and content.[192][196]

This began to change in 2012 with the release of the affordable Nexus 7 and a push by Google for developers to write better tablet apps.[197] According to International Data Corporation, shipments of Android-powered tablets surpassed iPad's in Q3 2012.[198]