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.
Having two separate and competing ecosystems actually makes Apple more money than if they had a monopoly. You're not just buying a mobile phone, you're on our team now. You're one of us. And we all have Apple laptops too.
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.
Yeah. Life is too short to deal with those kinds of problems.
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.
In the case of Apple vs. Android. I've used both, developed for both. Owned an Android phone for a long time, have no intention of ever going back. iOS is just that much better for me.
Exception being if Apple decides to be a bunch of fucking assholes and drop the 3.5mm jack.
"You don't know what you have until it's gone" is relevant here - those who don't switch may value what exists (and the perceived/tangible benefits of the vendor/platform they're using) well over any new snazzy features/improvements.
How many new "problems" or "missed expectations" will happen when I migrate that I didn't factor into the switch? About half my office switched to Android in 2012, then switched back in 2014 with the new iPhones.
About the only "leap of faith" that worked for me was moving to T-Mobile in 2013 - very very few problems with them, and the removal of bill anxiety is a blessing I cherish every month (I still have a monthly reminder telling me to check my ATT/VZ quotas - I haven't deleted those - they're my reminder of how shitty it was with them).
I think I ruined his life.
It's more like "Toyota or Mercedes-Benz?"
Even that doesn't quite capture it. Apple will defend a position at the high end of the market, even though they might give some ground in profit margins. They will do that by controlling the hardware and software, by vertical integration in CPU design, and by getting the best, newest technologies in the supply chain by locking up exclusivity. Samsung will try to chip away at this at the high end, but Samsung doesn't get how Apple attracts and keeps customers.
On the other hand, both the current dominance and the future potential for Android is understated by the article. Android is already above 75% share in handsets alone. Android N previews desktop features like resizeable windows. Android will be the basis of the vast majority of embedded screen-based UIs. Google's IoT OS is essentially a headless Android. And if Google can get tablets right, Android will become the dominant desktop productivity OS, too. Android will be in a class by itself, the way Windows used to for about 25 years, and the dominance will probably be as long-lasting.
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.
Google Hangouts seemed to be a step in this direction as well, with SMS integration, it pushes users to use their proprietary protocol instead where possible. But it looks like Google has backed off of it since then.
The author also argued that Apple's lock-in like iMessage isn't really working. Thus, this is how Android gets to 100%.
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.
And we consider android a single target, and not "Samsung, HTC, Motorola, Sony..."
We don't need android hegemony for easier development. We need cross platform development tools.
How is it a bad thing ? more work == more money for you as a developer.
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.
So same email / different password / different service.
I store all my contacts on my Windows Live account.
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When you register the phone with a Google Account it automatically creates an Account for the email associated to the Google Account.
I then want to add a Windows Live account in order to sync my contacts.
Android OS prevents this by disallowing the registration of the Windows Live service by telling me that the email address is already associated with an account.
The Windows Phone developer stack is great in regards to Android, but with all the missteps Microsoft did, the last being the failure to fulfill the promise of upgrading all WP 8.1 devices to WP 10, we really only have Android as viable alternative to iOS.
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.
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.
(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.
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).
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
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.
Motorola G3 (July 2015, £150 currently on Amazon)
iPhone 6s (September 2015, £497 currently on Amazon)
Obviously a device costing more than 3X as much is going to perform better, eg my S6 (£355, also 2015) almost never crashes and is fast.
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.
