Android is gaining because of carriers. What Apple really needed to announce (and why their share price dropped when they did not) was launching on Verizon.
Does anyone have any insights as to how AT&T is maintaining its iPhone exclusivity in the US? It's obviously great for AT&T, but seems to be very bad for Apple.
Yes: Apple signed a contract that gave them exclusivity until 2012. I'm guessing AT&T lawyers did a good job wording that clause.
I had always thought it was a 3-year deal expiring in 2010. I didn't see this news when it broke last month. So, no great mystery here.
AT&T was either extremely smart or extremely lucky for making the deal they did. I'm sure Apple gave up way more than they wanted to just to get the phone out the door.
It looks like Apple takes 20% market share by size and 80% by revenue. Android takes 80% market share by size and 20% by revenue. The carriers are giving away Android phones to price sensitive customers.
That looks like Apple's strategy with respect to iAds, too. It looks like iAds will be focused on large, mainstream consumer brands and AdMob will be focused on affiliate links for boner pills.
Big advertisers don't want to advertise to price sensitive customers and App developers can't sell to them.
Hardware? Manufacturers still get $hundreds per phone even when they are "free."
Software? If Android gets 80% of the market by size (they don't, and won't soon, but might in five years) then that 30% of app revenue will add up.
The keynote mentioned that Apple has paid out $1 billion to developers through the App Store and advertisers have committed to $60 million dollars so far to iAds. Developers get 60% of this.
I see or hear no numbers from Google. Google hasn't even rolled out Google Checkout worldwide, yet. The Android devices that Google is selling are being given away by the carriers. A customer that received a free device and has not input their credit card into a payment processor is probably not the type of customer that I want.
The bulk of the manufacturer's revenue comes from the contract premium anyway which the buyer does not see. Even a "free" Android handset might net the manufacturer $400.
It's pretty obvious to me.
In my last 2 residences, I had no problem with Verizon, and big problems with AT&T. In both locations, missed and dropped calls on the AT&T network were common. Additionally, I never see the 3G icon displaying on my iPhone in my home, and this morning I could not email 4 pics from my iPhone to my wife. They are still sitting in my out box.
I had a dropped call with a client earlier today. With Verizon, I rarely had any issues. I would pay 2x to have this phone be usable to me.
I've had the opposite experience. And T-mob customer support is far nicer.
It may be , though, that what works best depends on the particular region. Still happy with their customer support; they helped me in assorted ways and it was quite pleasant.
The only pain point that they didn't hit hard enough (as hard as they could) was battery life. They improved it, but they also traded away some of the improvement they could have made for thinness. Maybe my data points are biased, but I can't recall hearing anyone complain about how thick the previous model is. Whereas annoyance about remembering charge pretty much every day was something I've heard about lots of smartphones from moderate to heavy users.
Maybe those users are sure enough to upgrade from an iP3 the iP4, so they skipped that point of annoyance in favor of going for the "fits in a smaller purse" factor?
The real winners in this kind of arms race are the consumers. Every phone upgrade is really a major upgrade, and the phones don't really cost you anything different.