Android invaded Japan

I must say, Android has been really sweeping the Japanese mobile market since November.
I noticed the number of downloads of Who dares YES?, the android application I developed, increased dramatically in the last two months.
The number of downloads reached 4,000 in the first four months of release,
then 5,000 more downloads in November and December.

What happened?

Well, honestly I knew this was coming when major Japanese mobile carriers announced a plethora of new Android mobile phones for the winter of 2010-2011.
This leads to an explosive increase in Japanese Android users.

What does this mean?

In Japan, mobile phones are SIM-locked, which means that you can only use your phone with one specific carrier. Because of this, customers choose one carrier, and almost never change it. Just imagine how inconvenient it is to tell everyone your new phone number and email address. Before, only softbank, the smallest carrier in Japan, offered smart phones, but this winter season, all carriers announced new top of the line Android smart phones. Because of this, almost all Japanese customers now have access to smart phones.
But that's not all, normal Japanese cellphones have many functions unique to Japan, like a wallet function with which you can pay everywhere, just like with normal money or a credit card. Also carrier email-addresses, high-quality camera's, waterproof phones, etc... Many Japanese customers couldn't live without those functions, so they weren't very impressed by smartphones like the iPhone, which lack all those functions. But the newest generation of Japanese Android phones have all these functions in addition to all the functions a smartphone brings.
Smartphones became a lot more attractive for the average Japanese user all of a sudden.

My company also started promoting smartphone use by giving financial incentives to upgrade to an Android smartphone to encourage IT staff to develop applications for Android.