Platform updates and the rate of innovation

Apple, obviously, blew the doors off with opening weekend iPhone sales - 9m units in 3 days, up from 5m last year. Having day one launch in China and adding DoCoMo to distribution obviously helped, but there's clearly still strong underlying organic growth. And it appears that this is without substantial demand for the 5C (which is not an early-adopter/queue overnight sort of product). 

However, the really interesting thing is that there are now 200m people using iOS7, where last year 'only' 100m people upgraded to iOS6 in the opening weekend. The chart below shows what this means, as compared to Android, the other platform. 

Google, of course, is trying to address the fragmentation embodied in these charts with a shift to Google Play services, as neatly explained by Ars Technica here.  But though this means Google itself is less subject to fragmentation, it isn't much help to a developer wondering whether to use APIs that are only in Android 4.2 or later - let alone one wondering why their app crashes on one Android 4.2 phone but not another. 

This issue makes it hard for Google to drive the agenda for new mobile technologies within Android: it will take at least a year after announcement before a meaningful part of the base has access to anything new. Hence the focus on Google Play services and on the cloud with things like Google Now - moving everything several layers up the stack from the intractable fragmentation problem, and making the hardware OS less relevant. But of course, this reduces further the reasons to upgrade your OS, and makes it much less likely that third party apps will do anything on Android that they don't do on iOS (system utilities and other minority interests aside).  

Conversely, a developer can use anything that Apple announced in iOS7 and be confident it will work on all their users' devices. So anything innovative Apple does takes effect right now. Apple does have some fragmentation issues - some of the coolest features in iOS, such as Airdrop or iBeacon, have chipset dependencies that rule out older hardware. But Apple's integration means that it can drive innovation on the device much faster than Google. It can do Airdrop - putting that in the next version of Android and expecting it to work predictable for a meaningful proportion of the base any time soon would be much harder. 

Hence the paradox: the open platform is actually slower-moving in some ways than the closed one.  

Incidentally, the fact that Google seems to be moving more and more innovation away from the OS poses interesting questions about future roadmaps. Will 'Android' still be the main platform in the future, or will it be Chrome, or something else, with Android buried underneath?