How many iPhones in Australia?
It's been in the news. People have been talking about it incessantly for the past year. But there's a simple truth behind the chatter — the iPhone is not available in Australia. Officially.
We may be girt by sea, but that hasn't stopped a phenomenal number of grey imports from reaching our shores. For aussies with disposable income, it's a hot accessory. And for geeks, it's the must-have gadget. (Hey look, there's mine.) Seriously, if you haven't used an iPhone yet, you simply won't appreciate how much of a game-changer this little unit is.
So with all the talk about how Optus will be the preferred carrier (which implies 3G support and a lack of concern for rural Australians) one might wonder how many sales have already been lost due to American imports.
Well as it turns out, I happen to run an "Installer" repository dedicated to localising various facets of the iPhone to Australian conditions. It does some useful stuff like format inserted telephone numbers correctly, and identify +61 prefixed numbers as local (very important for SMS messages). From what I can tell with a google search, it has become the de facto method of applying Australian localisation to the iPhone.
And it so happens my web server gets hit every time someone chooses to install these patches. So I ran an analysis of these logs, weeded out duplicates, and came up with a total of 4,492 distinct installations for the current firmware revision alone. Here it is in chart form, showing the number of downloads per day versus the firmware revision.
Considering that only a minority of Australian users have used my localisation (for example, one of my friends is still using a very old firmware), its no stretch to estimate the number of iPhones in Australia to be well over 10 thousand. Not bad for a product that isn't available.