I think outside of iMessage, Apple just gets the US market, which isn’t a surprise I guess because Apple is an American company. The way they advertise their phones and design their features feel like they are all optimized for the US market first. A lot of new features like Apple Card and redesigned Apple Maps always come to US markets while other big markets have to wait a long time before Apple brings them over.
There are other small things like the heavily app-focused design, which favors a lot of different apps that each does one thing and one thing well. This is different from how a lot of emerging markets have superapps (e.g. WeChat) that will dominate your daily life. A quick example: iOS has built-in non-customizable QR code scanning (either as a quick action from Control Center, or automatically from the camera app). This is useful let’s say you want to scan a restaurant menu or an URL link. But let’s say you live in China, most of the QRs codes you see are usually WeChat / Alipay links that you have to open the specific app and scan the code from there, making a built-in OS feature completely useless.
And of course iMessage itself is also a uniquely N American thing because a lot of other countries moved organically to other apps like WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat and so on.
The iPhones are also priced expensive enough (Apple doesn’t do price differentiation across markets) that in a lot of lower income countries they are just too expensive compared to lower-priced Android devices, whereas in US, the general income level is high enough that they are affordable (but still expensive) to a lot of folks.
I do wonder about the specific markets like Japan, since iPhones are also really popular there, and I wonder what Apple is doing specifically right there comparatively? (iPhones are popular everywhere but I feel that in Japan specifically it’s even more popular. Maybe because of a lack of good local competition?)
Apple marketing (and product/design) has consistently trumped Android in this regard, and it has paid off here.
Without exception, the only people I see EXCITED about $1000 Android flagship phones are the 30-50 year old geeky men I work alongside in IT/development.
Virtually everyone else: they either LOVE their iPhone… OR more commonly: they don’t give a crap about phones at all… and thus bought a dirt cheap Android or a very old iPhone model, because “low cost” was their number one concern.
FaceTime is also higher with kids these days, they literally hang out on FT for hours.
I just got gifted an Android Tablet which is my first foray back into Android in about 8 years. Holy hell, using it is like going back to the Stone Age. It’s so infuriating because there are so many things that with iOS are just baked into it that now I have to go out to the Play Store to find something that works.
Weather? Why the hell is there no default weather app? Guess I’ll go research and figure out the best one. Oh, I need a task list? Well shit, there isn’t one of those either. Back to the Play store to look through the thousands of task list apps.
Then most of the options for things you do download on the Play Store are absolutely terrible. I’ve been using this Android Tablet for 3 weeks now and the one thing it has taught me is that I’m not moving away from iOS any time soon.
I think it’s the fans. Most people have iPhones and don’t really TALK about iPhones. Android owners GO OFF about iPhones. It’s cringey behavior and puts people off. You don’t want to be associated with that kind of person, nerdy or dorky or just overtly negative over really nothing *when you’re a teenager, as it’s social suicide. Even Samsung ads give off that vibe. The phones could be the next best thing , but if the owners are douchecanoes and the marketing plays into it then it’s not really going to vibe with the kiddos, no matter how good of a product is out there.
I’ve seen way more Apple users dog on Android users so this is completely wrong. People don’t like texting Android users because there’s no iMessage and they always get made fun of with the camera quality being bad despite it never being true and just being an app optimization issue.
I live in Germany and people in my age started to state that an Android would be a “red flag” or “cringe”.😅
I worked 3 years as a representative for an android brand. I was always top 3 in my team regarding results and sales. Even if I could convince people to buy android, I could never convince myself. Also 8 in 10 people in my team used iPhones. It’s not just younger people. While the iPhone is not perfect, it’s simply better, more polished and more reliable. Get a new case and screen protector for your 3 year old iPhone and it still feel new, while your 3 year old android is ready to be recycled by then.
Which 3 year old androids have you used? Because I simultaneously run iPhone 13 and OnePlus 9 pro and they both run the same.
Software sells hardware. You wanna see a folding-phone gimmick take off? Just wait till Apple makes one.
I’ll take one at $2499 with a 512GB drive.
Probably would still be 256
Literally not a problem for anyone but Google, a company.
It can be an Apple issue if Androids market share diminishes to below 20%
Google has the money to lobby congress for antitrust suits and Apple may have to pay Google to keep Android alive
It still boggles my mind that you can get in trouble because your competitors can’t keep up with you or have a worse product than you. I get that this doesn’t really happen often, but it’s both funny and sad.
iMessage is vendor lock in, not being better. Apple is just as bad as 90s Microsoft on vendor lock in and EEE.
vendor lock in is not what you think it means.
I know full well what it means. Did you also sleep through the docs where Apple said they use iMessage as a way to prevent people from switching? What Apple does here is no different than Microsoft making using anything but IE on Windows in the 90s miserable. Or how to this day they keep obfuscating Office formats while pinky promising for real this time they’ll support open document standards.
It’s a little more complicated than that. It’s not just a question of market share, but whether you use your market share to make it impossible for others to compete against you.
For example, Microsoft was getting itself into trouble in the late 90s because they essentially used their dominant position in the OS market to push Internet Explorer— making it next to impossible for other browsers at the time, like Netscape, to compete. For example, they made it difficult for other companies to install their software when their own competitive alternatives were included for free, and in some cases, impossible to remove (explorer was fully integrated into Windows at this time and you couldn’t remove it).
There are plenty of companies that essentially own entire markets. Google for example something like 85%. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Almost no one remembers you used to have to pay for Navigator, but they couldn’t compete with free and built in IE.
Heck with windows 95 you used to have to pay for IE, you had to get the Windows 95 plus package or you had to buy IE separately.
It’s almost like all of the things that the anti-Apple bandwagon complains about are the things that everybody else likes about Apple. Simplicity. Design. Device interconnectivity. Social features that only work with other iPhones.
Call these things “gimmicks,” all you want. It’s not a gimmick if it works.
Just cause something works doesn’t mean it’s perfect. Remember blackberry
I keep reading this is “a US issue”. It isn’t and it isn’t just iMessage. In Japan, walk up and down the crowds in the subway and an astounding majority of people have an iPhone. Most people are using Line to message. There’s more to it than blue text bubbles.
The problem in the US, especially K-12, is the dominance of iMessage in all forms of groupchat. Teens use iMessage in the US just like people use Line in Japan, WhatsApp in EU, etc.
It’s a social class issue; the lowest end new Androids are about $50, the cheapest new iPhones are $430.
Over the years Apple has fixed a lot of the annoyances that Android users had with iOS, and meanwhile Google has locked down Android, implemented measures to prevent rooting/customization, made all their apps a constant A/B/C/D test controlled by server-side flags that constantly rearrange your UIs and prevent the ability to sideload specific app versions, been less generous with the free service offerings, and repeatedly shut down, re-launch, re-brand, and overhaul all their apps and services.
Google does a pretty good job at selling iPhones.
implemented measures to prevent rooting/customization
This part isn’t true. Google Pixels (just like Nexus) are the only Androids out there (other than Fairphone) that allow you to sign and re-lock the bootloader after installing Calyx or Graphene. And you can even install Graphene using webUSB now.
That said, I agree on the rest. While Apple was adding CardDAV and CalDAV, true NFC support, shortcuts, and SMB, Androids were dumbing-down its interface, and removing the 3.5mm jack and the dedicated fingerprint scanners.
Now iPhones have USB C, and iOS will be getting sideloading. All I have left to miss is the back button, notification panel, GBoard, and ability to turn off blocking animations.
Android alienated its power users to (fail) to court iPhone users, while Apple successfully did the opposite, courting power users. It’s worse recent sins are removing force-touch and the SIM slot.
I got tired of all that treatment after years and years of using different types of Android devices. The update scenario didn’t help either, even though Samsung has done massive strides to improve in that aspect.
Samsung totally ignores their low end phones. In fact, if you’re on Android, expect one, maybe two OS updates in your phone’s lifetime before you have to replace it.
That is so true!!! Constant ui changes in google apps are fucking infuriating. One day for 24 hours I even had COMPLETELY missing watch later playlist on YouTube and I use it all the time.
Yeah this is one of my biggest issues with Google overall: they’re wildly inconsistent. Apple’s apps mostly stay the same, FaceTime is just FaceTime and has been forever. Google on the other hand changes which app they’re pushing in any given category like every couple of years and it’s incredibly annoying. Every time I check back in it’s like the apps are either designed in a totally different way, called something different out of nowhere, or totally deprecated and replaced with another app.
I miss the rooting/jailbreaking days it was fun to learn how the software and hardware functioned in unison with each other why side loads would or wouldn’t work. And honestly most the stuff that people consider cool or just take for granted on the iPhone now or only available through jailbreaks on the earlier models!
Yep. Jailbreakers got us the first app store. Before that, Jobs wanted every “app” to be a webapp :(
Apple has definitely won the branding wars in tv/movies. You can easily compile references to their tech like facetime, screen sharing/imessage (a couple of movies and an full episode of modern family used it as the main vehicle to tell the story), or even Live Photos (which seems like a big reach, but a whole episode of The Other Two was based on it). I wonder if things like that have an effect on teens’ view of apple v. every other tech company
Apple has definitely won the branding wars in tv/movies.
They also continue to reinforce this on the apple tv shows/movies. You constantly see the people using Apple products in them, and now that the service is a few years old and actually has some banger shows (looking at you Severance, my favorite show), that’s just going to continue
They would need to completely revamp the branding if they want to market towards younger non-tech interested individuals. Simplify the hardware/software and boost marketing with a cool and luxury focus. I don’t think feature improvement is required for this problem in NA, you need to change the nerdy alternative image people have in their minds when they think Android.
But they basically own the rest of the world so idk if this is even an issue.
It dominates the rest of the world due to cheap android phones being available there and many of them can’t buy Apple phones for cheap.
For example: India , where I come from, people can’t afford iPhones so they buy the cheaper android phones. But literally every single person buys an iPhone as soon as they can afford it. iPhone market was really low in the past because you couldn’t even buy it there. Now that the used iPhone market is growing there, a lot of people prefer buying a used , relatively cheap and reliable iPhone over a new cheaper android phone.
Market penetration is the issue. Not that people over there love android over iPhones.
Everyone there loves iPhones over android.
this is bang on right. In south america, everyone rocks the chinese androids, but if they can afford or get an iphone during a visit to the states they jump on it.
