Moreover, give iPhones are significantly more expensive than comparable Android phones, Apple’s ability to claw market share back from Android phones over the last decade is the opposite of how a monopolist might operate by flooding a market with cheap alternatives. It speaks to a consumer perception that iPhones have a larger value.
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held...
My experience switching from iPhone to Android is I lost pretty much nothing and gained a lot, particularly by going to a folding phone (which Apple obviously doesn't offer yet). Android is much easier to work with in most ways - iOS is so set in its ways it can be very difficult to do basic things like transfer files from the phone to a computer.
Apple's processors may be faster, but this is becoming an increasingly less useful distinction on phones. The only thing on phones that continues to require increasingly faster processors is stuff like games, and fair enough, but I honestly just don't play them on my phone personally.
Not sure what kind of competition is needed to browse the internet, watch YouTube, listen music and occasionally shoot few pics.
On top of that, I have been locked out of my apple account for 2 months when my iPad with the authenticator suddenly died, good thing I had a desktop to use as I could not login in my MBP. Apple just kept sending me emails of them contacting me in two weeks to reset my password and kept not doing it.
And I won't even mention their "privacy" charade. If you forget your MBP password you can reset it in recovery mode and thus access any MBP.
Sure, all your apps get logged off, but you can still open any file.
I hate their products and wish I didn't have to deal with them, but I have to test apps and websites on their hardware.
Google and Samsung tried and failed. Google with their flagship Pixel line, which just doesn't sell well, so they moved downmarket. Samsung with their Galaxy line, but they're always playing catchup/copycat to Apple.
The sad fact is that 1) Google sucks at hardware, 2) Samsung sucks at taste.
Apple really has a magical combination of (arguably) good taste, and operating chops to deliver the hardware at scale.
People really paint Apple and Android ecosystems in auras that weren't true already a decade ago.
Agreed that Samsung is just playing copycat to Apple. They used to make great, innovative phones without being a copycat, like back in the S4/S5 days, but then they just decided to copy everything Apple did, like eliminating the headphone jack.
Google would not be doing it if it wasn’t for the advertising business. It’s pretty much the definition of a loss-leader to get people into the ecosystem for things that google can monetize. So android as a product is implicitly, foreverially tiedup with marketing and spyware, because google isn’t onboard otherwise. Same as gmail or search was a loss-leader to get people onboard for advertising too. Google only cares about these things insofar as they might stop being a funnel into their money-makers.
SOC vendors can’t make a run providing 7 years of driver/firmware support for a product they sell once at bleedingly thin margins. Or at least, they really don’t wanna.
OEMs can’t make a run providing 7 years of support for someone else’s software, especially when they also have to do a lot of the driver work themselves thanks to IHVs abdicating their job.
Consumers get stuck with a product that loses support in 2 years or whatever, and may even have landmines involved with unlocking it to continue support (Sony wipes the camera firmware if you unlock the bootloader for example). They face a completely unnecessary hardware and software treadmill due to all these other factors. Supporting your own phone is not a reasonable expectations for Joe Sixpack either.
The idea is supposed to be the “linux model” but honestly linux has the same problems, it is reliant on the same unpaid labor around driver work to make up for the inability of vendors to track the ecosystem and provide the long-tail of support. In cases where the vendor can’t open source it, the functionality simply ends up broken, and driver support, kernel versioning, and DKMS is a constant battle for end users. Just like with custom roms for android.
Android simply has too little margin split among too many disinterested parties to ever really work. And fixing it would involve either increasing the size of the pie (margin), which consumers in this segment hate to an unfathomable degree (android users = cheapskates is a reliable first-order approximation, borne out by the app store revenue too).
But that's the free-market system working as intended, right? Literally every penny has been squeezed out of margins, software costs pushed onto free labor in the open-source community, and ad revenue used to contra-fund and push end-user prices even lower. Android is the finest solution the free-market can deliver, that's how the system is supposed to work, and it’s delivered an excellent product for the needs of the customer - it's just you're not the customer, you're the product.
The alternative is vertical consolidation and bringing more things under the same roof, raising the price, and targeting the consumer needs instead of the ad revenue needs. Basically the apple model. But that can never be a viable path in a GPL world. And it will still probably involve paying more - phone costs are currently subsidized by all these indirect costs like ad money and vendors cutting corners on support. There is more work that will need to be done, and that contra-revenue from advertising revenue needs to be backed out of the purchase price, so at the end of the day consumers will simply have to pay somewhat more (hopefully not apple prices of course). But again, people are cheapskates, android users doubly so.
I don't know why people got so allergic to the idea of paying for their operating system, the baseline assumption now seems to be that it needs to be free, and if that's the case you will never be free, only stuck in a choice between advertising-mongers and exploiting unpaid labor. And that can either be in hardware costs, or in actual recurring support costs, but either way, someone needs to be paid to sit down and make sure the bluetooth and sound drivers work.
You see the same problem in software too - open-source projects get commercial entities tapping their value without providing contributions back, or existing via patronage to the needs and goals of the commercial entity. Without an incentive by the actual developers to provide end-user value, and with permissive licensing, you end up with a constant struggle for financial homeostasis. Firefox/Mozilla, for example.
People complain about android but they still are not willing to pay a little more to opt-out of these problems. The revealed preference is for purchase price above all else, and people still think in the yardstick of Apple being "too expensive" rather than Android being "too cheap". The yardstick is still the artificially-cheap advertising-subsidized Android product.
These are fundamentally problems of not enough margins to support all the players in this ecosystem, which leads to them looking for places to find the revenue to make it work. Pay a little more and these problems go away.
If you want to stop being the product, get used to opening up your wallet. That transactionality is a good thing - you can’t really demand boundaries when you’re living on someone else’s dime. It’s Google’s house and they’re letting you crash for free. But this is the very deepest core of the problem - people will do anything except just pay a little more.
You will never stop being the product if you can’t bring yourself to be a customer.
(Yes, I pay for kagi, how did you know!?)
This misperception is key to understanding the market, which is really two markets: Android has cheaper phones and dominates there but in the mid to high-end market the situation is reversed because the equivalent Android devices aren’t cheaper and because Qualcomm/Samsung lagged so far behind on CPU performance you’re getting something which performs like 1-2 iPhone generations back in most apps.
Breaking out of that dynamic is hard because the Android manufacturers have to share more of their hardware revenue with less service revenue to compensate, so they don’t really have much room to lower prices since they’re already underperforming at the same price points.
What could change a lot would be regulators forcing App Store competition or limiting revenue sharing across units. Apple and Google both benefit from that at the expense of the pure hardware vendors, but I’m not sure how effective e.g. the EU App Store regulations will prove in practice.
A bit off topic, but I personally find Google, and by extension, the Android ecosystem, to be an underhanded business model. I don’t feel bad it’s ending poorly for them. It’s especially rich Google ripped off Apple in order to get Android launched [1].
[1] https://www.mactrast.com/2013/12/inside-story-android-ripped...
Apple makes 25% of its profit from laundered ad money. Like you need to stop trying to understand a sophisticated duopoly ecosystem from a fanboy blog.
That won't stop a hefty share of HN posters from repeating that same whinge.
