Comment by codelust | Hacker News Reader

Comment by codelust | Hacker News Reader

Which of the following scenarios are unlikely?

1. iOS triumphs everything else as the one mobile OS to rule them all. Everything else dies.

2. Android triumphs everything else as the one mobile OS to rule them all. Everything else dies.

3. In the big wide world, both iOS and Android do well, appealing to different masses and classes. The developer ecosystem also makes money off both platforms, albeit in different ways.

I use the above question to grok most of the stories in the tech community these days. And I think both are fine platforms that appeal to different people in different ways.

Yes, a popular game is making more money off Android than Apple. So what? Tomorrow there will be another story about someone making more money off iOS than Android.

The Wired story on Rovio posted yesterday has many points relevant to this madness. They optimized towards maximizing their profits from all available platforms by adapting to the strengths and weaknesses of each platform.

Honestly, companies that succeed for any reasonable periods of time all do that. The whole 'kill x' angle is the breathless reporting and commentary that plagues most material on tech these days. It has little place in the real world.

Format wars have sometimes ended up with one winner, and then there's the windows precedent.

I think a lot of the polarization comes from fear of one side or the other 'winning' - a fear that isn't entirely baseless.

Except iOS and Android have the exact same format - large touch screen. The technical differences won't be relevant to 99% of customers, it's the advertising and brand recognition that will make the difference.

By that token, VHS and Betamax both had the "exact same format" of magnetic tape in plastic boxes. Their similarities didn't stop one from driving the other out of the consumer market.

Personally, I suspect that Apple has lots of time before Android chokes off the smartphone market, and even longer in the tablet space. But eventually, the commodity-hardware producers are going to do to those devices what Compaq et al did for PCs; Apple will have to decide between marketshare and margin, and I suspect they'll choose margin even if it makes them decreasingly relevant. But by that point maybe they can invent some new niche.

I am not sure the Windows precedent applies here. At the height of the reign of Windows the landscape as far as the competition goes was extremely different. To point out one of the many contrasts - Apple did not have the kind of money it has today or the strong auxiliary channels: apps, music, ebooks etc to support its main product line.

I don't think anyone can say the world is going to be 90% Android or 90% iOS as far as handhelds are concerned. It is a market that is still opening up and there are at least three distinct pricing segments in it. Plenty of space for the top 2-3 to grow without killing anyone else.

Probably #3. Much like game consoles have competed against each other for several decades. Seems to be a very good comparison. Most of the big titles will be cross platform, some tiles will be paid exclusives, with lots of smaller games targeting one or the other until they reach some critical mass of success that justifies going cross platform. It's going to be a Columns/Tetris -- Mario/Sonic sort of world but not just for games -- applications too.

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