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Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

Trying to break in to the high end of the smartphone market as a newcomer is a mistake. That's Apple and Samsung's territory, and they have the muscle to fight you intensely for it. The Chinese manufacturers have the better idea: start with cheap phones, build a user base, and move up.

In particular, the camera is the ace in the hole that the established players have. People spending $700 on a phone expect a top-notch camera, and from the reviews it sounds like the Essential Phone isn't cutting it. Unfortunately the camera is the main reason why there won't be any Cinderella stories about new high-end phone makers: Apple, Google and Samsung probably have teams of hundreds working on camera software now that the low-hanging fruit has been plucked, and new companies can't hope to match that.

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And that's the thing, the OnePlus One was both "cheap" as well as incredibly high-value in terms of features and performance.

'start with cheap, build a user base (and also expertise, people and money flow), and move up' is a common strategy for most of newcomers of any market, the IT history give us IBM mainframes to DEC minis to SUN workstation to IBM personal computers as example.

Keep in mind Apple was in the same position before the iPhone. Remember what palm said about apple becoming a player in the mobile space?

"PC guys are not just going to walk in here and.."

And yet they did.

How about the phone just sucks? And essential just really has no idea what people want?

Palm got upended because their product was not actually that great. It solved a need, for sure, but the core quality was not there.

What is iPhone bad at? Where's the entry point for a disruptor?

One could argue that the iPhone is bad at 'openness', but that seems to be a non-factor or at least a negligible factor to at least some very large percentage of consumers.

> What is iPhone bad at?

ecosystem lock-in, not allowing un-vetted apps to run, walled-garden approach to everything. based on comments i see here, some people are mad enough about this to avoid iPhones altogether.

that's where i'd start, if i were trying to launch a smartphone platform today.

And when someone's phone ends up with spyware, bitcoin miners, and they're signed up for 12 different $10/month "premium" SMS text services do you believe they'll be happy to be outside the walled garden?

I consider myself a nerd and I find it amazing that some of my fellow nerds learned absolutely nothing from IE and ActiveX: Users will always click Yes/OK/Install/Please_own_me. Providing an "Allow side-loading" checkbox guarantees these people will get completely and utterly owned. The latest free-to-play game will promise a "Chest of Gems" if they check the checkbox.

Some spyware purveyors and scummy ad networks are even now prompting iOS users to install mobile provisioning profiles and the users willingly tap through multiple prompts to install them despite the scary warnings! These users end up with MITM VPN profiles installed that redirect all traffic or get extra spam email accounts setup.

I enjoy having a gatekeeper that keeps most of the riff-raff out. I haven't always agreed with the decisions but I've never been secretly signed up for a premium SMS plan, had a coin miner installed, had my browsing history or contacts harvested, etc.

i could not possibly be more invested than i am in the apple universe. i've used nothing but macs since 2001. i've never owned a smartphone that didn't have an apple logo on it. i make my living writing ios apps. i am mostly pretty happy with apple's choices.

having said that, i think apple goes too far. they could make things safe for the average grandma while also allowing more latitude for tinkerers. they should allow you to hook up your phone to different backend services other than their own icloud. they should not be trying to take 30 percent from every transaction that happens in ios apps. they should allow you to buy music and movies from places other than their store that works just as seamlessly for the end user, with no friction. and so on.

android, on the other hand, goes too far in the other direction. google is so hands-off that they let device manufacturers get away with murder, at the expense of their users.

there is a happy place in the middle that somebody with deep pockets could occupy, if they wanted to.

Some people, but clearly not a lot of people.

One can basically level the same charges against Android, and indeed the entire tech industry for having closed source chips, firmware, baseband etc. It’s unfortunate that we’re all so beholden to corporate behemoths and that we don’t have a totally, top-to-bottom free, open and democratic hardware&software in technology.

A very wrong and a very short-sighted approach. Other comments have already pointed this out.

Two things:

- ease of use

- privacy

These two may sell the product even if it lacks certain features.

- ecosystem (as in "do I have an app for that?")

This is essential (pun intended), but Essential is already running Android, so they are covered there.

These things allow iOS to remain relatively secure for end-users while Android continues to be a wasteland of exploits.

I'd argue I want my phone to be as secure as possible, more so than my laptop, since it is my authenticator for most of my services.

Most end users are satisfied with their iOS devices and don't try and use it as a ssh machine or toolkit. They install Candy Crush and some Google apps at most.

You listed the exact same thing 3 times. And yeah, some people care about this, but most users don't. A new entrant to the market that uses this as the defining distinguishing feature isn't going to succeed.

> You listed the exact same thing 3 times.

nope, not at all true, and i already covered many of the details over here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15350080

> A new entrant to the market that uses this as the defining distinguishing feature isn't going to succeed.

when the iphone came out, the critics said it was nothing new: not the first phone with a touch screen, not the first phone that could play music, not the first phone that allowed you to browse the web, etc. all true. and also, way too expensive. the people at blackberry watched steve jobs' original keynote and declared that it wasn't even possible! and yet the iphone succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams.

there is always a market for doing things that seem to have been done before, but getting the details exactly right, for a certain set of users. i think allowing a whole ecosystem to blossom around a phone, provided by many different companies instead of just apple, done with exactly the right amount of curation, is just such an idea.

I consider those to be minor advantages - I want my phone to be as close to an appliance as it can be - those things help it be closer to an appliance.

It is behind in terms of what's possible. It just added wireless charging for example.

The iPhone X may be their solution to that: charge a super premium price to essentially leapfrog to the next generation and thereby keep the volumes low so they can do things that don't yet scale.

Has anyone been able to break into the smartphone market lately?

I can't imagine beating Xiaomi, Samsung, Apple and the other big billion dollar conglomerates this late in the game without a significant Nobel prize worthy idea.

OnePlus has become a pretty big player from zero.

Isn't that what Tesla did, though?

yeah, but they did something new/different. In terms of margins it is always better to serve the high end.

Hypothetical car analogies are imprecise enough already.

No, basically nobody had expensive luxury electric cars before Tesla. This is more what Faraday Future was trying to do - be late to the game and copy, maybe change a few details to try to marginally improve it.

What Tesla did is more like what Apple did - massively expand the "smart phone" segment in the first place.

If you compare the Essential phone to a V30, S8, or Pixel, there's nothing anything near the difference of comparing an iPhone to a Nokia N95. Something that is so compelling it makes you not care about the other things the iPhone doesn't have that the Nokia does, like GPS and 3G. Similarly the Model S vs a 7 series: one has more bells and whistles, one is a fundamentally different product that a lot of people not very interested in the old option find much more compelling.

"No, basically nobody had expensive luxury electric cars before Tesla."

But high end luxury cars were a thing. Tesla wasn't competing with just electric cars, they were competing with all cars.

Not initially, no. The all electric drive-train and buying into the future was always the key hook for early adopters. I think a large part of early demand was not because it was the best car for the money, but because it was special, unique, and you believed in Tesla the company and wanted it to succeed.

Tesla would have gone precisely nowhere with a mass market luxury gas burner. Established brands had that market pretty much locked up and beating them on quality when starting from scratch is basically impossible.

Small players in this market have to go to the ultra-niche extremes where you sell like 20 cars a year for millions of dollars per and usually still lose money.

The electric drive was the killer feature on the Tesla. Without it the car has no reason to exist.

Also, by luxury car standards the interior of a Tesla is absolutely subpar. They were competing against cars with handcrafted mahogany dashboards and precision stitched leather seats where people will spend hours and days fine tuning the static and moving resistance on the heater control knob to get it just perfect.

But their strategy was still go to after the high end market, instead of try to target the low end market and go up.

That is true, and it works because there is a market for high end vehicles. The market is there because the high end companies make a product that is measurably better than the mass market product from traditional manufacturers.

Such a thing really isn't possible in the cell phone market. A tiny shop can't build a phone notably better than an iPhone or a Galaxy. The only luxury phone provider I know about just glued diamonds on old dumbphones and went out of business.

Essential was apparently banking on people finding the modularity concept to be a killer feature worth a price premium, but that has not been the case apparently.

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