Apple says many users "bought an Android phone by mistake"

Apple CEO Tim Cook spent a moment during his keynote at the company's Worldwide Developer Conference today comparing user adoption of OS X Mavericks with that of Windows 8, mocking Microsoft's OS for only managing to convince 14% of the total Windows user base to the 8.x versions. But Windows wasn't the only operating system that he spent time berating.

After sharing some pretty impressive sales figures for the company's iOS devices, Cook said that around 130 million customers have purchased their first Apple device in the last twelve months. That's certainly a figure to be proud of, whichever way you slice it, but rather than focus on that positive statistic, he decided instead to berate the competition. 

"Many of these customers were switchers from Android," he said. "They had bought an Android phone by mistake, and then had sought a better experience and a better life." He added that almost half of those who have purchased an iPhone in China since December have switched from Android. However, it is worth noting that iPhones were not actually available in China until December, when pre-orders began, so it is unclear how much of the device's popularity there is simply down to the novelty factor, rather than a burning desire to flee from Android.

Not content with leaving it at that, Cook went on to note that 89% of the installed user base has already upgraded to the most recent full release of Apple's mobile operating system, iOS 7, before adding that this was "in stark contrast to Android". Just 9% of Android users, he said, have so far upgraded to the latest version, 4.4 KitKat: "Many users are running an OS from four years ago. That's like ancient history."

With a graph to illustrate his next point, he went to say that many Android users "can't get security updates", which he noted was problematic "because Android dominates the mobile malware market." The graph indicated that 99% of mobile malware is focused on Google's mobile OS. 

Cook then ended his focus on Android with a final quote from Adrian Kingsley-Hughes of ZDNet: "Android fragmentation [is] turning devices into a toxic hellstew of vulnerabilities." 

There's nothing quite like a bit of negative marketing.