Nope its actually a totally real and meaningful measure. it measures how much of the market
market -> all the people
encompasses your share
share -> using your stuff
Apple has shown time and again that it isn't a good measure of Profitability, but your statement seemed to imply a more general connotation that I can't help with disagree with.
If more people are buying product A, but product B has a longer useful life, then it conceivable for product B to have a higher usage share.
The problem is that usage share is a lot harder to measure than market share. But ultimately it's the more important number when it comes to things like network effect and developer and consumer mindshare.
Market share actually does in some respect account for a sum of existing products in use, how that is calculated will depend on the reporting entity.
Usage share turns out to be super easy to capture these days, we do it by looking at the browser string of a request to a web server. Most big sites are putting out this type of data so a relatively clear picture emerges.
For a company like microsoft or apple market share is a more useful measure because it helps them plan/predict their supply chain so that they have the right amount of inventory in the right place at the right time.
But from a developer perspective usage share is more interesting for obvious reasons.
In this case the numbers are still basically the same.
Except that it doesn't measure the actual using at all; I seem to recall there being rather more interesting stats than just vanilla "market share" in the iOS vs Android comparison that show that while more people have Android devices, more people with iOS are spending more on, and using more Apps.
So again we see that apple has been good at getting the platform profitable here is a great article that breaks this down. It ends up being less about the fact that iphone apps are better per say (which I think they often are) but more about the fact that significantly more apps for android start out free.
How so? Because these so called 'markets' of which share is measured are not markets at all. They are simply groups of products that analysts have decided to add together.
