Apple’s FaceTime is a Total Failure

If you are an Fanapple then stop reading now. Go read some MG Siegler stuff elsewhere. This one is about an Apple failure, so no point in you staying around and flaming the comments.

In June, Apple have boasted a lot of numbers during WWDC. Gleaned out of Alex Wilhelm's coverage of the event, we had the following numbers. For the event itself:

• Apple's 23^rd WWDC
• Over 1,000 engineers in the event
• Tickets sold out in 1:43 hours
• People from over 60 countries attended

For the App Store:

• 400 million user accounts
• Over 650,000 apps in the sotre
• 225,000 apps for the iPad alone
• Over 30,000,0000,000 downloaded apps
• Apple paid out over $5,000,000,000 to developers
• App store is available in 120 countries

For OS X:

• Around 66,000,000 Mac users
• 26,000,000 copies of OS X Lion shipped

For iOS:

• 365,000,000 iOS devices
• 80% of the users running iOS 5
• 7,000,000,000 push notifications sent daily

For iMessage:

• 140,000,000 iMessage users
• 150,000,000,000 messages sent so far, a billion a day at this point

Some other services:

• 125,000,000 iCloud users
• 10,000,000,000 tweets sent through iOS 5
• 47% of photos shared on Twitter are sent from iOS 5 devices
• 130,000,000 Game Center users

There are some more numbers and announcements there, and we've already got accustomed to being bombarded by Apple with numbers in each WWDC, so this one isn't any different. It isn't any different in one more aspect: there's no mention about FaceTime's numbers, and to me, no numbers mean only one thing: the numbers aren't impressive. Apple's FaceTime service hasn't been adopted as Apple has expected and its numbers are too low to boast at.

How unimpressive is FaceTime?

If you take iMessage in the 9 months of its existence until WWDC, it had an average of 120 messages per user per month. If you take Skype in September 2011, it had 300,000,000 minutes of video minutes a day. If this same value stayed the same since September, then at the same time of iMessage existence, it would have gathered 81,000,000,000 video minutes. That's a bit over 50% of the amount of messages over iMessage. For video calls versus instant messages – this ratio is huge. FaceTime doesn't come close. We would have known about it if it did. - There aren't a lot of areas related to the iPhone where Apple doesn't publicize usage numbers and FaceTime is one of them. The only reason I see for this secrecy is the lack of success on FaceTime's part with users. I was one of those who thought that Apple will move the video calling industry forward. I was wrong. In the end, Google pulled an Apple instead. It brought WebRTC that will now disrupt the industry.