iPhone Future

FWIW battery life on my Nexus 6p has been very good and also consistent. Nexus is definitely the way to go if you want an Android phone.

I couldn't agree with you more. I'm bored. The thing is I like the simplicity of iPhones and I have been using them for past 7 years as well. Now it got to a point where small incremental features were not doing anything for me. I switched to Nexus 6P recently. It is one hell of a phone. So many features, so much customization! The access to file system (not root) is one thing that I would not be able to live without anymore. Having directories to put files and music in is so simple and similar to using a Mac/PC. I do miss iMessage and FaceTime though. If the rumor about WWDC bringing iMessage to Android is true I don't see a reason to go back to the iPhone.

Is a phone supposed to be exciting?

(I'm using "exciting" to mean the opposite of boring)

Yep. I'm honestly not sure how important it is that the iPhone is exciting, but it still needs to be making meaningful progress for people to keep upgrading

Waterproofing and wireless charging are tried and tested on Android. Meanwhile no one I know uses force touch and most have turned off live photos. TouchID was probably the last truly great iPhone innovation.

I'm not even bored, but disappointed. The iOS 9 upgrade made me unable to access music on my device, photo backups are sorted into hundreds of subdirectories, re-authenticating iCloud automatically re-enables iCloud Backup and iMessage, and I need a third-party calendar app because they removed the month view that gives me a truncated title for each event. There are some other small annoyances, like being unable to permanently leave the phone in Low Power Mode, while only two phone models support Apple's battery case.

I'm just not convinced that Android won't have an equal number of strange problems.

It is kind of a cliche by now but so are the questions we have been asking Apple and demands we have been making to the company over the years.

I am no sales and marketing expert but at some basic level, it comes to me that Apple probably doesn't innovate (in a way - relatively; esp. when compared with innovations in Android phone market and in ridiculously low cost phones at that) because it doesn't have to. Apple knows that it has a userbase that would keep buying its phones (in some cases as long as close to 7 years) even though it was so lacking in innovation and still kept charging the awe-tax.

No, I am sure you are not the only bored iPhone user. I have a friend who has owned every iPhone (one from each release - he had a 6s but still bought SE and then sold it) since the first iPhone and never stopped whining about it but still says, when I ask why he keeps buying, "because it's an iPhone and it has a 'feel'".

You don't disagree, do you? More and more companies are using an Android OS, thus, the increasing amount of (device) fragmentation.

What percentage of the market is running Marshmellow? How many are even 5.0+? That's one serious indicator of fragmentation alone (there's a lot more), and trends don't show it improving.

Edit:

Here's a link to some numbers from Google [0]. Per their own chart, ~55% of Android users are running a 3 year old or older OS.

[0] https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html#Pl...

I think your description of what happened is exactly what is meant by "letting Samsung and others take the lead" -- Apple let itself be surpassed, in that it could have done otherwise, but didn't.

> You are stuck with the default apps. Want to use Gmail or Outlook? Chrome? Google Maps or Nokia Maps? Too bad.

I'm confused. What do you mean by this?

"I switched back from Android for the 6s because I was tired of fragmentation and terrible battery life. "

I can relate. I had some many fragmentation problems with android that I said I'm done with it, then I tried Iphone. However, I returned my iphone before my trial period expired. I just couldn't sacrifice the android UI flow, multitasking ease of use, and a open ecosystem.

So I ended up getting the Note 3 when it first came out . That was like 3 years ago and I still have the same phone without any issues. My batters is now finally starting to give out and is only lasting about 6-8 hrs with use. However a new battery is only like 7 bucks on amazon.

I think 2 things happened that improved my fragmentation issue with android. Android itself has matured but more importantly I stopped all the automatic updates from my carrier and apps.

I observed with my previous android devices that once a new phone came out all the sudden my phone became slow as molasses . I'm under the opinion with nothing to back it up with, other than my observations is that the carrier (atleast ATT) updates the phone and purposely degrades performances with newer apps and updates to get you to buy a new one.

I don't think this is possible on the iphones because I don't believe that the carrier is allowed to bastardize it like android but I could be wrong? However that has been my observation and the one advantage I see for ios.

Your anecdotal experiences definitely don't match my anecdotal experiences.

I think we need to be careful with these kinds of stories.

This is pretty much the exact opposite of what I've experienced within my group of friends/family.

I tried the Iphone for the trial period due to its popularity once. Never again. Multi-tasking on the android is a breeze and flows more naturally vs my experience with the iphone. Plus the Iphone while once set the standard it now appears to be trailing far behind most android devices.

I recently switched my mom from the iphone to samsung s7 because it has a SD card storage. She recently lost all her pictures because the iphone died on her and there is no way to get it back . She had tears in her eyes because it had pictures of the grandkids. Keep in mind she has no internet nor computer at home she just wanted a phone wiht camara capabilities .

I had to explain to her that unlike her previous android phone that had removable SD card storage the IPHONE ecogreedness doesn't, because they want you to pay for there icloud storage.

Hence I switched her back to android with SD storage. Which makes it breeze to swap cards when they fill up and back them up without having to use craptunes.

Not saying androids are the best thing since slice bread but I don't see the hype about iphones and there closed ecosystem?

I think that a definitive conclusion on Apple's stand in the market calls for more elaborate analysis of the data. For example, if the majority of the growth in the overall mobile market is attributed to low cost smartphones, it'd be likely for Apple to miss on that.

AFAIK, Apple doesn't lose customers, it just doesn't gain as many as the overall market - and it still outpeforms the other mobile makers on revenues/profit by a huge margin.

Are we looking at the same article?

1) he shows no graph depicting anything to do with market share, let alone one showing it sliding. There's two graphs, one showing a dip in sales volume, another showing a dip in overall smartphone buying.

2) he did explain why he thought that, near the end of the article

> Now that paid apps are almost dead, what would Apple actually lose by opening up the platform a little?

Its reputation for being mostly malware-free, for starters.

Paid apps are far from dead. I buy apps all the time. I bought a watch face for Pebble half hour ago. Developers need to feed their families and I see buying quality apps very similar to buying good coffee or food.