How Android gets to 100% market share | Hacker News Reader

How Android gets to 100% market share

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44 pointscolincarter4174 comments

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.

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.

Keep in mind that many people spend a lot of analytical time on other aspects of their adult life: work, vacations, insurance, children (including paying for college), home maintenance, etc. Sometimes smartphone and entertainment fall into the group of things just not worth spending your limited thinking time on.

Or making the statistically correct purchasing decision is not the most important thing in their life.

Maybe it's because they value their time/money more than giving the manufacturer another chance? It's a hassle to have to deal with a defective product. If you're lucky, you catch the defect early and can return it (though shipping is a hassle). If you're unlucky, you'll do the repair-dance: all the shipping hassles plus not having the use of the product for however long it takes to be fixed.

Yeah. Life is too short to deal with those kinds of problems.

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.

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..

The iPhones that people queue for are usually incremental upgrades not "capability enhancing" devices.

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.

While I find those who hop from one product to another are often doing analysis without enough data. They're the ones who are making rash decisions, and if not, then they should be able to show me their data.

"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 have a Sharp TV. I noticed a while after I bought it (still fairly new, <1 year) that the left half of the screen is dimmer than the right. This is not a big enough problem that I will deal with Sharp about the warranty (I tried, they wanted me to jump through hoops so I said screw it). You can be sure I'm not going to buy another product from them. It's a minor QA issue, I don't mind it about 95% of the time, but when Samsung or LG make basically the same thing for a similar (lower?) price then why would I bother with Sharp again.

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.

It's a form a wisdom. At first you try to maximize every variables, later on you realize that meh, that part (car, phone, foo) is alright as it is, let's do something else. Instead of amplifying the market turmoils, you try to act as a capacitor, smoothing out the noise.

I agree there will always be Android and iOS, but for different reasons. Brand loyalty taps into the same part of the brain that team loyalty does. Being a die hard Apple fan is the same as being a die hard Red Socks fan, as far as our brain is concerned. So to create that brand loyalty, there has to be two separate teams to compete against, a rivalry. Mac vs Windows. Android vs iOS. Mets vs Phillies.

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.

It's not like "Ford or Chevy?"

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.

I ran into a rural agricultural phenomena in which people wanted the biggest, baddest, newest, fastest, whizzbang available. One was particularly upset when I informed him the place he purchased said biggest, baddest, newest, fastest, whizzbang was a discount store and thus didn't have the biggest, baddest, newest, fastest, whizzbang; all they had was older tech.

I think I ruined his life.

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.

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.

First time iPhone buyers, coming from Android, for example.

I meant first time Apple buyers which includes both people who've never had phones and people who've switched. Apple's first time customer base is still significant.

> 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.

First time buyers generally base their choices on the opinions and views of more experienced people, often within their circle of friends, family and acquaintances. It is quite conceivable that a first time buyer is making their choice because of the vendor lock-in of their peers.

That's called a recommendation, not a lock-in.

The author also argued that Apple's lock-in like iMessage isn't really working. Thus, this is how Android gets to 100%.

It is a recommendation based on lock-in. Of course it is not an absolute, but also of course it is highly likely that if there is vendor lock-in, it will greatly impact decisions of first time buyers.

To put it another way, if everyone you know is using ACME OS, then it is highly likely you will start off by using ACME OS.

I never thought of iMessage as vendor lock-in before, but the blue vs green texts is the #1 reason I hear from my peers why they disparage Android users

For a while there was actually an issue with iMessage where even after you switched to an Android, iMessage would continue to direct your friends' iPhones to contact you via iMessage instead of SMS. So if you left the iPhone platform, all of your iPhone-owning friends would be unable to text you.

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.

This is still an issue, as far as I know. If you switch from iOS to another mobile OS, you have to deregister your phone number from iMessage here: https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage

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.

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.

Interestingly, you consider "the web" a single target, and not "Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, Opera, IE" on "Linux, Windows, MacOS, IOS, Android"

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.

I don't think that will ever change but toolkits that let you target more than one platform will continue to improve (like Qt).

> 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.

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

More work == more developers needed to get the same job done == less productivity == lower wages.

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.

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"?

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.

My gmail is registered as a Windows Live account.

So same email / different password / different service.

I store all my contacts on my Windows Live account.

-----

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.

I will never get an iPhone as it is a luxury on my part of the planet or when I eventually do get one, it will most likely be second hand.

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.

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.

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.

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).

Depends on the contract really... do we know what terms do the OEMs sign? If Google is free to change the terms on renewal, then they can simply state "must provide updates for X years, up to Y days after upstream, cannot change Z - or you can't call it Android". That would either cause an instant solution or instant full-OEM-forks.

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.

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.

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.

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

What "firmware issues plague Android?

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

This must be a joke

> What "firmware issues plague Android?

Apparently you lack reading comprehension as I listed two of them.

> This must be a joke

So here are a some more jokes specially just for you:

https://github.com/google/iosched/issues/79

http://www.androidheadlines.com/2014/11/samsung-devices-migh...

http://verybadalloc.com/android/2015/12/19/special-place-for...

https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/list?can=1&q=firmwa...

I'm experiencing a great low-level bug right now. Last week Google released an update that breaks SSL in chrome, google now, and the search bar. Apparently this phone has a buggy neon unit and their latest update broke the check that would detect the problem and disable the offending instructions. Even for a company with experience and talent like Google, and even having seen this bug before, they still released this code that breaks most things on my phone, and there has not been a fix for six days now. I can't imagine being a small developer trying to handle quirks like this in the vast array of phones on the market.

I looked into your first link, the linked google issues says:

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: android.support.v7.internal.view.menu.MenuBuilder at android.support.v7.widget.ActionMenuView.getMenu(SourceFile:620) at android.support.v7.widget.Toolbar.ensureMenu(SourceFile:823) ...

Is this really a "firmware issue"? I thought the inclusion of support libraries was the responsibility of the developers? Am I misreading this?

Samsung includes their own modified support library on the classpath, on some of their handsets, before the classes loaded from the APK.

So on those devices you need to load a customised versions to be able to workaround class loading priorities and load the right classes.

So the released devices have bugs - same thing happened on old feature phones. That's always going to happen - that's how consumer software works. This is not even close to what happened for J2ME.

1. If there was a J2ME bug on a phone, you were stuck with it forever. Only a handful of phones received upgrades and you had to find a specific cable to flash them, so most people never did. With Android you have a chance to receive a fix over the network - that's magic in comparison.

2. You're still using Android libs to write the apps. You're not downloading Samsung SDK which won't work on Asus, or LG SDK which won't work on something else. You're publishing one package, and not one package per phone producer, or even model. Again, magic in comparison.

> With Android you have a chance to receive a fix over the network - that's magic in comparison.

Assuming you shelled out money for a Nexus that wasn't canned like the TI one.

All the other OEMs aren't any different from the J2ME days.

All my Android devices got the same amount of updates as the J2ME we used to target, meaning either none or one.

Updated via the desktop software that came with them.

> You're not downloading Samsung SDK

You mean this SDK?

http://developer.samsung.com/sdk-and-tools

Or this one?

https://developer.sony.com/develop/

Or this one?

http://developer.lge.com/resource/mobile/RetrieveOverview.de...

I don't see any difference.

All of those provide extra functionality. Extra, as in beyond what you would normally need for an app. There are sensors, themes, accessories, etc. They're not available in (for example) non-Samsung devices, so they don't really apply there.

In J2ME you pretty much needed to use custom SDK to play a sound. Or draw a screen fast enough to do scrolling. Or just activate colours at all. I'm talking about things like http://www.j2megame.org/j2meapi/Nokia_UI_API_1_1/ which provided sound and ui canvas.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

But a very crappy camera.

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.

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

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.

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.

I ran into this the other day. Under accounts, you tap the account you want to delete. There should be the option to remove account in the menu button ... It just says sync now. Tap the account again. That took a few hours to figure out.

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

"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.

The OS slow and crash frequently?

Didn't you know? Windows on circa 2009 Atom netbook is also slow and crashes frequently, therefore Windows is a bad, slow, crashy OS.

(Tongue in cheek, obviously).

incidentally, I know a best selling author who wrote his two first books on a 2009 atom netbook.

(conclusion: stop blaming the tools and get back to work)

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.

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.

That's a big flaw with Android, people make unfair comparisons because the average Android phone is cheap. Using your example:

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.

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

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