
How Android gets to 100% market share - colincarter41
http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/01/how-android-gets-to-100-market-share/
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patwolf
My grandfather was a Ford man. He would only ever buy a Ford, even during
periods when other manufacturers were making vastly superior vehicles.

I used to think such loyalty was a silly generational thing. My generation was
a fickle consumer. We would research and decide on a purchase based purely on
merit. That's how I was with phones. When iPhone was the most compelling
phone, I would buy an iPhone. When there was a more compelling Android phone,
I would buy that.

However, as I get older I'm starting to understand loyalty, and it's not what
I expected. It isn't a dogmatic belief in a brand. It's recognizing that
sometimes it's easier to stick with what works and not worry about whether
there's something better out there.

Now that we've been living with smartphones for a while, and they mostly just
work, I don't expect people find as much value in switching between Android
and iOS. As long as both exist, neither will ever reach 100% market share.

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vlan0
I find a lot of those brand loyalist tend to be foolish in many ways. They
make decisions based on emotion, rather than analytical thought.

I worked in retail for a good part of a decade, and I was dumbfounded by the
number of people who would never buy another product from X manufacture based
on a single poor experience with one product. It's simply an emotional
response to their unpleasant experience which results in the person making a
decision without statistical data to validate their idea. Which seems like
nothing more than just plain ignorance.

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JohnTHaller
You mean someone who spends days sleeping on the sidewalk in a tent to buy the
new version of a pocket computer isn't buying based on analytical thought?

The thing is, I can understand staying up late and going to a midnight release
of something like folks have done for a new Harry Potter book or a new Halo
release. Following that up with staying up late reading the stories of the
characters you already know to find out what happens next after waiting for a
year. Or buying Halo with a buddy to head home and play the story in co-op for
a few hours to have fun and see what the next chapter of the story is. With
each of those emotion comes into play but for a reason and a purpose. But, in
each case, you're satisfying a curiosity of what happens to a story/characters
and you're spending no more than maybe 20 minutes of your time. Plus, you get
to incorporate it into a fun evening with friends (having dinner and playing
games for a couple hours before heading to the store to grab the game and
coming back and playing for a couple hours). But, camping out for days to buy
a new version of a pocket computer designed for consumption of content just
seems silly.

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lnanek2
A new smartphone enhances your capabilities, though. They are tools. So the
guy waiting for a smartphone instead of waiting to see Harry Potter is going
to come away from the experience with more capabilities than he had before.
New entertainment like movies just wastes your time and money.

They are also powerful status symbols, like having an expensive Rolex. Someone
who is first in their circle with a new iDevice is like a minor celebrity and
gains attention and status. Depending on their position that can be converted
to things like enterprise sales, intimate partners, etc..

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JohnTHaller
The people in line for an iPhone 6 have an iPhone 5s with them. Nothing life
changing is occurring at all. Someone buying a smartphone for the first time
isn't camping out in line at the Apple store.

There is no difference in having an iPhone on day one vs day two in terms of
social status or business status. And certainly not romantic status.

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forgettableuser
This author has a pretty cynical view that the only reason people use iPhone
is because of vendor lock-in, like from iMessage.

This disregards the fact that many iPhone customers are still first time
buyers with no lock in hanging over their head. And also Apple has an
extremely high customer satisfaction rate keeping customers coming back.
Customers buy iPhones because they like the experience and ecosystem, not
solely due to some service lock-in.

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JoeAltmaier
I don't think there are any more first-time buyers of phones left in the
world. Really. Its not a thing any more. Also no first-time shoe buyers, or
food buyers. Except maybe the very young trickling into the market.

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chimeracoder
> I don't think there are any more first-time buyers of phones left in the
> world

I might believe you if you said the US, but given how low iPhone penetration
is outside the US, combined with how many new people use the Internet for the
first time each day in India alone (100,000,000 per year, most of that being
accessed over a mobile device), it's clear that smartphones haven't hit 100%
potential market penetration the way "food" has.

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goodcanadian
I haven't read the article, and I love my Android phone, but I sincerely hope
Android never approaches 100%. Monoculture is never a good thing.

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amelius
True, except that as a developer I'd prefer to target only one architecture.
Now we're forced to write apps for iOS and Android and the web separately.

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spriggan3
> True, except that as a developer I'd prefer to target only one architecture.
> Now we're forced to write apps for iOS and Android and the web separately.

How is it a bad thing ? more work == more money for you as a developer.

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adrianN
Some people like to do interesting work instead of doing basically the same
thing over and over again.

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philliphaydon
I moved from android to iphone to Windows phone to android to iphone.

I'm sticking with iphone. Android has been the worst experience for me. Had an
old HTC with 2.# and a Samsung note4, plagued with issues.

The thing that annoyed me most (besides Samsung bugs like not being able to
remove keyboard notification) is when you register with an email, you cannot
use the same email for another service.

My contacts exist on my windows live account which happens to be my gmail
addy, when I register the phone with gmail I cannot sign in with windows live
using the same email because the email already exists. A bug that doesn't
happen on Windows phone or iphone.

Coupled with slow buggy laggy android phones, and malware. I ditched iphone.
Android with so much market share is not a good thing either. Just a IE
scenario all over again.

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viraptor
I'm having trouble understanding your issue with email addresses. What do you
mean by "another service"? What do you mean by "register the phone with
gmail"? What do you mean by "sign in with windows live"?

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IkmoIkmo
I've got no clue, I use the same email account for gmail, microsoft, samsung,
facebook etc. I have lots of services with the same email setup.

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coldcode
Nuclear bomb on Apple campus? This isn't 1995 and Windows. If anything Android
becomes even more fragmented both for commercial reasons and by government
meddling requiring different things in different countries until the OS is
split up. Saying you are "Android" requires Google's restrictive license and
that grates on lots of manufacturers who would love to be out from under their
thumb and control their business. Don't forget that Apple still makes almost
90% of the profit from building devices. That is Android's weakness. Even
Google doesn't directly make much. You may love your phone but if building it
doesn't make the suppliers money something has to give.

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Zigurd
As an OEM you have basically two choices:

1\. Do Android. You can crap it up with bloatware, or you can resign yourself
to non-differentiation in software features and try to distinguish your
products in hardware.

2\. You can dick around with a badly supported oddball OSs and go back to
Android after you waste some money. Nobody is putting in the effort it takes
to compete with Android.

Maybe someone should put in the investment to compete with Android, but it
isn't true that "something has to give." It is possible to compete with
Android, but that will cost many tens of millions, and maybe hundreds of
millions _just to try._ Samsung won't put that kind of money into Tizen. Who
else has the potential to compete?

Really, the OEMs have nobody but themselves to blame for poor margins. If they
can't think beyond bloatware "differentiation" they deserve their outcomes.

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charlesdenault
I believe the fragmentation issue is going to take a lot longer to solve than
the author leads on. Android is rooted in its open nature, and it's what
caused the proliferation of the OS in the first place. It's going to take much
longer for OEMs to stop shipping bloatware on the devices, or Google will
_effectively_ fork the OS simply because the OEMs can't keep up. Look how long
it's taken Microsoft to get their OEMs to comply (but I do believe Google is a
different beast in this regard).

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pjmlp
Fragmentation is an old beast.

Android is no better than what we had with Symbian, J2ME or proprietary mobile
OSes that came before current crop of mobile OSes.

As long as OEM and networks have the last word on firmware, it will always
exist´, in name of product differentiation.

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viraptor
It's way better than J2ME and lightyears ahead of proprietary OSes. If you
think that's not the case, I don't think you remember those times very well.
With J2ME it was basically close to impossible to create any app apart from
the most basic ones without producer-specific APIs. Nokia, Siemens, Samsung,
Motorola, etc. - they all had their own special extensions. Even if some game
was released for more than one handset, each make had its own version.

(Although it was possible to write a translation layer - I wrote a nokia-to-
siemens translating classes which worked in most cases)

Now you may have issues with versions of Android and which features you can
support. You may also have issues with different resolutions. But it's nowhere
as bad as in 2002.

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pjmlp
I did develop for J2ME.

> With J2ME it was basically close to impossible to create any app apart from
> the most basic ones without producer-specific APIs. Nokia, Siemens, Samsung,
> Motorola, etc. - they all had their own special extensions. Even if some
> game was released for more than one handset, each make had its own version.

How is this different from the firmware issues that plague Android?

Have you ever tried to make the support library work properly across Samsung
devices, or even worse cheap chinese brands?

Or track down native crashes or memory leaks across Android firmware?

Whoever believes that Android is better than J2ME, never had to make their
apps work on cheap or network specific Android devices.

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pawadu
I am sorry, how can J2ME even remotely compare to Android?

With J2ME you couldn't write the simplest application before you ran into the
platform specific minefield (example: how to read the D-pad on different
phones?). On Android, running into problems is the exception not the rule.

~~~
pjmlp
The fact is that there are fragmentation issues due to firmware bugs.

And it isn't that exceptional, if you look at the bug database, specially in
low spec handsets.

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Amir6
If something works and as long as it is not such a crucial part of your life
and its a matter of life and death, you can (in many cases) always go with
what has worked previously. One other argument can be the cost benefit
analysis of the research itself. The time and energy (which ultimately
translates to money in some sense) you put on research may not be worth the
feature(s) one option offers over the other. You may never use that feature or
in case of price, how much you may have to more for the brand you are loyal to
may be less expensive than the risk you take by going with an option which you
yourself have not tested first hand.

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Buetol
They fly over the biggest details of all: The price.

For 100$ you can get the Moto E 2nd gen and I consider it a very high-end
phone (nice screen, fast, latest version of android).

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mcphage
The author mentions that—and that the fact that carrier contracts are dying
means that US consumers will become more price conscious. However, Apple's
high margins mean that iPhones are more expensive because Apple wants them to
be (and people will pay it). I don't expect iPhone prices to ever be as low as
Android prices, but if Apple needs to, they can drop their prices and still
make money on their phones. They just don't _want_ to (because they like
making money), and it's yet not clear that they _have_ to.

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ocdtrekkie
This post seems to ignore some huge points. Google can only solve
fragmentation by closing the platform, and ending it's primary incentive to
manufacturers. Meanwhile, the agreement it would need to use to do that, is
already such an overreach, that it's being gone after for antitrust in several
countries. In order to reach this Google fanboy's utopia, the agreement would
need to get much more illegal than it is now.

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Shivetya
I am not sure which phone my father has, but based on searches for trying to
solve a simple issue on his it seems like something many Android users have.

I cannot delete his email account off the phone. There is no method short of
pointing it to a bad email address and provider that I can find and I am not
sure it would even allow that change. Really, there is no option anywhere to
delete. I did get it to stop pulling email down automatically and when opened.

As in, give a consistent and easy to use presentation. Each phone company
seems able to totally muck it up but they all have odd issues in common

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vezycash
If the email you're trying to remove is the email used to register the phone,
it can only be removed by resetting the phone. The same thing applies to
Windows phone.

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IkmoIkmo
That's not standard though, I don't even have email setup on my S7 on the
standard email app, although I've got my phone registered... although I did
get the Gmail app and set up mail later, and I can indeed delete it.

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hathym
I have an iPhone and will keep it forever just to make sure Android will never
make it to 100% market share ( evil smiley )

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marvel_boy
"Anecdotally, one of the most frequently cited reasons among iPhone users for
staying with iOS is that they love the “blue bubbles.”

No way. I don't use iMessage (instead I use Whatsup) but I dont consider
Android. I have a Motorola G3 also (work) but the Os is confusing, slow and
crash frequently.

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IkmoIkmo
Yeah, cmon...

Text messages sent per day peaked in 2011 and have declined ever since, we're
now half a decade later.

In fact just last month we heard FB and Whatsapp process 60 billion daily
messages and growing, SMS 20 billion and dropping. Further, a decent chunk of
those SMS messages are from feature phones, i.e. on an iPhone the SMS to IM
ratio is more significant than 1:3 and again, growing.

Early on, especially for families, iMessage was somewhat of a big deal. But
today and into the future? My whole family is on Whatsapp, from age 10 to age
70 and we all have each others' numbers. We exchange text, videos, voice
recording, pictures, there's absolutely zero draw from iMessage. I use SMS
exclusively for things like 2FA.

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blackoil
Most SMS, I receive right now are promotional messages or transactional
messages from bank, airlines etc. Friend and Family have stopped sending SMS
for a while now.

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pducks32
Haha yea I know a lot of people who hate green bubbles.

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supercoder
How TechCrunch gets to 100% clickbait.

