On the Duopoly of Mobile | Hacker News Reader

On the Duopoly of Mobile

deprogrammaticaipsum.com

93 pointszdw116 comments

Is it really a surprise we ended up with a duopoly?

Apple was the first modern smartphone with the iPhone and quickly got apps. That caused massive growth.

Google was right there too, also had apps on a modern platform. They saw what people wanted.

Everyone else was late to the party with their modern OSes. MS, Palm, BB.

By the time they arrived Android and iOS already had a big lead. It’s hard to get a company to develop their apps for your 3rd+ place platform with almost no market share. So you have no apps. So things get worse.

It was basically first mover advantage. Palm might have been OK but they were screwed over by Verizon. MS may have survived in 3rd but they kept rebooting their platform and breaking compatibility.

Now the duopoly is too strong for anyone to break into without pouring insane amounts of cash in that will likely never return a profit.

Until there is another big shift, I don’t see things changing. The current game is over, Google and Apple are too far ahead at it.

MS had a halfway decent mobile OS, but pretty much stopped there leaving a barren software ecosystem.

I had an HP ipaq w/ windows before the iPhone and as an OS it was okay. I could do basic web browsing, email worked fine, RSS reader. I could even tether it to my laptop for reasonable pageload speeds online, I think around 1 Mbit. (Yeah, this was before the days of >3 MByte dumps on every page.)

But that was about all, and the mobile web was mostly non existent at the time. iPhones had the same problem to a lesser extent, but IIRC safari was smart enough to mostly make text readable. It was only after a few years that "mobile first" became the dominant mantra for sites.

As far as consumer appeal the ipaq was also crap on product design: it screamed business user, and I felt awkward taking it out in public and holding it up to my head. Whereas the original iPhone was sleek and instantly cool & fashionable, and not as clunky & big, it fit in the hand very well.

So MS had a passable mobile OS, they just failed in practically every other way, and their manufacturing partners never seemed to understand that a smartphone could break out of the enterprise mold.

Agreed. I had a Dell PDA with the latest version of Windows Mobile shortly before the original iPhone came out. It should have been quite capable but the interface was holding it back.

I’ve heard the OS was good underneath. But that couldn’t fix the legacy of how the UI was designed.

> MS had a halfway decent mobile OS, but pretty much stopped there leaving a barren software ecosystem

I had a WindowsCE device (an HTC slider) before I got my first Android (a Tmoble G-1). Android was vastly superior in every way it could be. It was so superior, that I never gave WinCE and Windows Phone another thought.

> MS had a halfway decent mobile OS, but pretty much stopped there leaving a barren software ecosystem.

MS had Windows CE for a very long time, they could have tried to make the UIs a bit more touch friendly (they were already pen friendly) while keeping backwards compatibility with the tons of existing software and development tools instead of forcing everyone twice to abandon their existing code for their mobile platform (once by forcing everyone to use C# and again with the new Metro stuff). Developers simply lost trust in Microsoft for doing the most anti-Microsoft thing with ignoring backwards compatibility.

You could program Windows CE with C# pretty easily. But those programs would not have worked on Windows Phone.

I did some dev on a few windows mobile devices at the time. The OS could do stuff, but it was awkward garbage. In 2007 was usability wise, a decade behind the iphone. Just painful.

I have to argue that the original iPhone, as it was released, had no apps, the camera was not good and iOS had a laughable feature set. It quickly evolved to be much better than it's initial version, but I remember being rather upset that I had wait until iOS 3 or iOS 4 to get copy and paste support - a feature which I had on my Symbian phone for literal years. And my Symbian phone had multitasking for ages too. And it could film video. The iPhone had a handful of impressive features, but it was not all too useful for the first few iterations, aside from Safari - that was a game changer. Other manufacturers weren't late to the party, they had already gone home well drunk by the time Apple arrived. Their offerings hadn't advanced much for years, and it took years for incumbents to realize they need to catch up - get their OSes to be modernized, create platforms and embrace capacitative touch screens. All this to say, initially Apple had great marketing and a great vision and a lukewarm experience delivered in a shiny package, at least that's how I experienced it.

That’s sort of what I was trying to get out with “modern“. Mostly the interface, but also OS guts. Palm was still creaking along on a very old OS stretched far beyond its design (for example).

I had an iPhone 3G running on iOS 2.0. Yes, it was missing things. But if you were coming from a non-smart phone you didn’t notice. And that’s where TONS of people came from.

> Is it really a surprise we ended up with a duopoly?

I have the strange feeling that the reason we have a duopoly is that companies can't get away with being a monopoly.

Yup! They can't give the death blow to the last competitor, so you end up with the dominant one and the open one.

Additionally its important to remember that Apple was making money on the combination of in-house hw and in-house iOS and Android was pretty much being given away for free to handset vendors - in a "commoditize your compliment" strategy.

For Microsoft to be able to make any smartphone OS margins versus Android being given away for free, they'd have to be willing to cut margin expectations or overly invest to make a "knock it out of the park" OS.

>For Microsoft to be able to make any smartphone OS margins versus Android being given away for free, they'd have to be willing to cut margin expectations or overly invest to make a "knock it out of the park" OS.

If Microsoft was able to look beyond OS margins into potential advertising revenue or App store revenue, then they could have justified the investment. But hindsight is 20/20.

I'd say it's important to remember in the 1990-2000's - its been documented that the bulk of their Windows OS capability was selling to corporations through enterprise sales and support channels. Windows OS for consumers was a bit of a pull through, tag along. Zune perhaps was the first consumer first product launch which was less than a success. Ballmer just wasn't a great customer facing guy.

I think now (in the 2020's) they've put in a solid effort to shore up their cloud business and they have about a decade of experience with direct to consumer through Xbox and Satya Nadella seems more similar to Tim Cook in terms of leadership. It could be interesting if they seriously tried again in a commoditize your complement strategy - but perhaps that ship has sailed.

Everybody forgets about sidekick in this comparison. Had apps, email(push pop3!), IM, a functional browser was a killer device esp considering what hardware they were working with at the time.

Before the iPhone I had a very nice phone with apps and a keyboard. It was a PalmOS device called the Treo650. Loved it until the company died and I went to an OG Droid.

Blackberries were the best there was for its time, they were the dominant players before the iPhone. Unfortunately RIM didn't have enough vision and simply stagnated. Maybe it was for the best, as Blackberries were even more walled in than iPhones.

Imagine a world where Ballmer wasn't blinded by the desktop and enterprise market during the 2000s, and Windows Phone actually became a thing, and we had true competition among flagship phones today. Imagine a Surface Pro phone with modern specs that could sideload any x86 application. One can dream.

Alternatively its interesting to imagine if instead of buying Nokia, Ballmer had instead doubled down more fully on cloud and bought servers to subsidize the transition to the cloud in order to compete with Amazon AWS. Azure wouldn't be playing catch up now.

It'd be challenging to try to sell handset manufacturers a WinMo license to compete with Apple (who makes money from HW and only more recently apps/subscription services) when Google was giving Android away for free to the same handset manufacturers. Even historically low margin Amazon gave up on the Fire phone.

Additionally smartphones are a very visible consumer facing product and thus very visible from an anti-trust populism perspective. [1] Imagine Steve Ballmer testifying in congress like Zuckerberg, Cook, Dorsey, etc. - he would totally have bungled it.

That said for consumers (rather than MSFT shareholders) a triopoly is for sure better than a duopoly.

[1] Bill Gates thinks Windows Mobile would have beaten Android without Microsoft’s antitrust woes https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/6/20952370/bill-gates-windo...

> bought servers to subsidize the transition to the cloud in order to compete with Amazon AWS

Microsoft’s (enterprise) customers weren’t ready for the cloud back then. They could have made a bid for the rest of the market, but I’m not sure the rest of the market wanted Microsoft.

Standard disclaimer: I work for AWS all opinions on my own.

I wouldn’t even say Azure is playing catch up to AWS. Azure is a strong second as far as marketshare. It also has a company behind it that knows enterprise and knows how to cater to it. Technologically, I can’t think of a single enterprise/startup need it couldn’t meet.

MS’s developer tools have always been great.

Yes, I realize that this is a “Nixon goes to China” post.

Winning in mobile is a Pyrrhic victory for Google. It came out in the Oracle trial that Google only made a $27 billion profit on Android from 2010-2016. Google gives more than half that much per year to Apple to be the default search engine. Losing mobile was the best thing that could have happened to MS.

It let them concentrate on being everywhere.

It would've been nice if Nokia had made another MeeGo smartphone after the N9 with the same sort of quality and usability.

Windows Mobile was a thing and sideloading was the standard method of installing applications. WinCE also had handwriting recognition built in to every device running locally on a 200MHz arm processor with 16 Meg of RAM. Programming was possible on WinCE 6 using .NET 2 or 3.5 as well as C++. It was very performant on a device with 64 Megs of RAM. I guess the problem was that versions after WinCE 7 binaries were not compatible with the previous versions as well as Microsoft working solely through OEM's for releases rather than direct to consumer like Apple or Google's partnerships. There were lots of also rans in the industry such as Palm OS Cobalt (6.0) not being used by anyone and the Amazon Fire.

Article from 2007 :

> Of course, the discussion included the upcoming Apple iPhone and Mr. Ballmer had a few funny things to say about the device.

>> It's sort of a funny question. Would I trade 96% of the market for 4% of the market? (Laughter.) I want to have products that appeal to everybody. Now we'll get a chance to go through this again in phones and music players. There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/steve-ballmerwindows-mobile-60...

What Ballmer and others missed (or blithely ignored) was the user experience with the iPhone vs other devices back in 2007.

I had used various PDAs and mobile phones that had Internet access (of a sort) back then. Generally speaking, they had very tiny screens, a poor or nonexistent touchscreen, grossly underpowered processors with insufficient RAM, a cut-down network stack, and a crappy "browser". The best pre-iPhone experience (that I experienced) was the Moto Q, running Windows CE, which actually had WiFi and a almost tolerable text browser.

I won't even talk about WAP and WML and how well all that worked.

Compare that to the debut iPhone. Much larger capacitive touchscreen, smooth scrolling, pinch zoom / expand and more. You went to regular desktop websites, and they just worked. Then you see all the effort put into the UI for the address book and other apps, and that all adds up to a user experience quite unlike anything else at the time. Revolutionary. A better experience than even the Windows CE handheld PDAs.

>You went to regular desktop websites, and they just worked.

Yeah I kinda wish fewer sites gave me the mobile version. I really hate the sites that give me the mobile version after I request the desktop version.

You are 100% correct.

They probably all missed this because the executive class all used Blackberry's (Google executives and Microsoft executives) which is another "also ran" in the business. I agree with your point about mobile browsers. No one ever putting much of any effort into supporting fast rendering of html or javascript much less AJAX in the web browser applications and feature phones all used something other than HTML like WAP. The best a user could hope for was a phone with a fast web proxy that performed the rendering like Opera Mini.

> Opera Software pioneered with its Small Screen Rendering (SSR) and Medium Screen Rendering (MSR) technology. The Opera web browser is able to reformat regular web pages for optimal fit on small screens and medium-sized (PDA) screens. It was also the first widely available mobile browser to support Ajax and the first mobile browser to pass ACID2 test.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_browser

Web hosting providers and content creators didn't put much effort in to creating an alternate internet using WAP and WML. It just never materialized as viable.

Obviously 2% is pretty far off but it strikes me, given that objective, that this is sort of what happened except that Android usurped Windows Mobile/Phone, and that's what they needed to be watching.

Microsoft could still make an Android fork the same way they rebased Edge on chromium. Since android is mediocre on many aspects (e.g. no modern and performant Java support) they could differentiate and create a market opportunity. Their name is big enough to create a store. They already have a linux distro BTW https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner

>Microsoft could still make an Android fork the same way they rebased Edge on chromium. Since android is mediocre on many aspects (e.g. no modern and performant Java support) they could differentiate and create a market opportunity. Their name is big enough to create a store. They already have a linux distro BTW https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner

I think this is what never made sense to me about the failure of Windows Phone. They have a store. They have an operating system. They have an unbelievably extensive list of hardware partners with decades of manufacturing experience. They have some of the best engineers in the world. And yet, they ceded the single largest consumer industry to Google and Apple. The only explanation is poor leadership.

Windows phone had to introduce a store, operating system, and new hardware partners. The store was launched in tandem with Windows Phone and not added to the Desktop version until 2 years later. The OS and existing software base they had was irrelevant for small touch screens. The hardware partners they had weren't relevant to the mobile space and they weren't doing enough hardware development themselves to just rely on the in-staff hardware folks they had.

Eventually they tried all these things but too late. They tried rebuilding the OS to be for more than just desktops, they tried rebuilding app platforms to not be platform specific, they tried rebuilding the interface to not be use type specific. It lead to a lot of angst due to the churn and a failure in the mobile space as their competitors already had working alternatives to all of these before they even launched.

Poor leadership for sure but in waiting through all the 2000s and letting other's fill the space not because they already had everything made for them and let it fall apart.

Xbox is one area that has seemed to really pan out for them which got all of these changes over time but again they launched that in the early 2000s not the early 2010s.

Windows Phone came out at a time when smartphones were still lifestyle products. Apple was the king of the hill in that respect and Google was still perceived as a pretty cool company even if having an Android phone wasn't as showy as having an iPhone. Having a phone from Microsoft meant you were probably a corporate weenie who wore pleated khakis and spent their day in a cubicle. The quality of the phone and the OS didn't really play into the perception of it.

It's interesting that the perception wasn't the same in other parts of the world. Windows Phone seemed to be a premium product in Argentina. Think it had good acceptance in parts of Europe too, likely due to the Nokia versions. Perhaps trying to conquer the world except North America could have been a viable strategy but that's hard to really know and given the influence of the North American market on global culture, it might not have worked.

Android didn’t succeed because anyone thought Google was cool. Android succeeded because it was ubiquitous when Apple was only available on AT&T and because Androids phones were cheaper.

I still think the largest balkanization factor in the current duopoly was the cellphone carriers. They have to support the phones they sell. They want as few variables in their support matrix. QED: three options is too many.

Windows Phone had several major opportunity positions where they had all the software the needed and all the hardware they needed to make a statement and then: cellphone carriers simply refused to sell SIM cards to them.

For pretty much the entire lifespan of Windows Phone it generally only had one of two major US carriers reluctantly shipping its flagship and the other supposedly "angry" at Microsoft and refusing to even allow it SIM cards on its network, with flip flopping which one was which between different "flagship" phones.

How does any product survive in an ecosystem that harsh?

I still find it bizarre that phone carriers sell phones.

This shouldn't be an issue, in much the same way "Comcast only supports Dell and Lenovo laptops" would be incredibly weird.

Well, it's not just selling phones that is the issue but selling SIM cards. That's closer to the "Comcast only supports cable modems with Mac addresses they've identified and Command & Control functionality they need" analogy. (Which are things that cable modems support. Cable company operators can force certain cable modem operations similar to the way SIM cards support such things.)

But also, it really isn't all that bizarre, it's got long precedent: For most of a century all phones were leased and the phone company controlled every bit of hardware on the network. That's not even the distant past, that's still in living memory, my parents grew up in households with leased phones.

It took major anti-trust/monopoly breakup work to change that. So far the "use whatever phone you want" is the anomaly in the history of phone networks. (Cable companies too; most of their history all of their equipment was only leased and the era of being able to buy your own set top boxes and/or cable modems is a relatively brief anomaly versus the longer history of those networks.)

The US is back down to only two/three major cell carriers (no matter how many "brands" you see; so many of them are just resellers), depending on how you want to count them (by network compatibility: two; by parent company: three). It may be time to trust-bust again.

But Comcast does only support Comcast modems. They’ll give you access but if you call with a question they’ll tell you tough shit and blame your hardware.

That hasn't been my experience, in lots of years of having to call them and make them fix dumb things. Once you get past the "no, I am quite sure there is no wifi interference on this cat5e cable" bit of the Generic Support Script, they do seem to be capable of understanding where the problem could plausibly be. (Ability to do anything about it varies.)

They even helpfully provide a compatibility list: https://www.xfinity.com/support/devices/#unauth

What would be the point of Microsoft failing with Android in the same ways that Amazon and Samsung have already failed here?

(Admittedly, I still don't se a lot of the point in Microsoft running Chromium Edge other than sadness and defeat. I use Chromium Edge on my work machine because they block Firefox and I dislike Chrome and Chromium Edge is such a sad shell of what Edge once was.)

The point you're missing is that Microsoft is actively improving chromium

I don't think I'm "missing" that point, but I do think you are missing mine:

Amazon has tried to improve the Android ecosystem since day one, on the taking things at face value that Android was supposed to be an open platform for innovation, and instead has failed in just about every possible way. More than any other company, Amazon continues to prove that you cannot improve Android without Google's rubber stamp and that no one wants an AOSP-based phone without "Play Services" or Google's App Store. Amazon's App Store is still the next biggest Android App Store after Google's and it can barely be listed as an "Also Ran" on the scorecard way below Google's numbers.

Samsung similarly has spend nearly as much effort trying to improve Android and seen all sorts of failures. They've proved that few care about AOSP hardware improvements if it doesn't have Google's rubber stamp. They've proved in their own attempts no one wants an AOSP-based phone without "Play Services" or Google's App Store. They've proved that you can't use AOSP certified hardware to bypass the cellphone carriers' extreme aversion to a Third option in the ecosystem and continue to fail at trying to bring Tizen phones to market (because the cell carriers don't care about AOSP, they care about "Android" TM, Google Style).

What kind of "active improvement" can Microsoft bring to Android that Amazon and Samsung haven't already tried and failed at? What would be any sort of point in Microsoft investing in AOSP-based products when they have no easier time of selling them through today's cell carriers than they had with a proven Kernel and software stack that they own entirely? Especially without Google's complete consent and access to "Play Services" and the Google App Store moat, what can Microsoft possibly offer in Android that they couldn't better offer in "Windows Phone 11" that wouldn't also see the same extraordinary bad luck/worse market conditions than Windows Phone <= 10?

(ETA: Especially all that as opposed to by the time Edge switched to Chromium there were already a half-dozen other browsers using Chromium as their base and also Microsoft had already contributed multiple improvements to Chromium for years. There's no "success stories" in "Open Source" Android. There's very few people running de-Gooogled Android successfully and no one has been able to market one successfully in stores. Microsoft themselves even contributed cash for some of the hard lessons of Cyanogen, Inc.'s funding for their eventual burnout.)

Yes dethroning the google play services is a hard goal so here I'm mostly advocating for microsoft to keep the play services (and propose at the same time a side store to reduce paid/subscription apps costs). BTW any idea why the android tax doesn't apply to netflix?

> What kind of "active improvement" can Microsoft bring to Android that Amazon and Samsung haven't already tried and failed at? A lot.. 1) the android Java VM is dogshit and abandonware, using openjdk would bring support for modern java, significantly improve performance on key workloads (e.g. ZGC sub 1ms pauses for android gaming..) and have a different impact of energy consumption. Those are 3 disruptives dimensions where microsoft can differentiate. 2) bring support for other programming languages would bring a competitive advantage vs the java only apps. 3) have an up to date linux kernel... Also properly finetuned like the Clear linux distro AKA disruptive perf 4) at the OS level there are many ways to improve the experience e.g. ships by default with a browser that has extensions support (such as Kiwi browser). Prebundle a power user extension pack (wikipedia link preview, tab search, etc) generally propose at installation time to optin for expert chosen apps that improve the experience (swiftkey, Tree of life, pomodoros, a notion like note taking app, etc). Moreover the playstore is filled with crappy app, there should be a default app that curate them and provide meaningful recommendations instead of letting users navigate that ocean of garbage in search of the hidden pearl. fix the many ergonomic nonsense failures (e.g ability to quickly set app, phone and alarm volume in any context). Backport many ideas found only in iphones. Correct absurdities such as Bluetooth profiles with mics not allowing spatial audio. also my lack of disk space force me to delete apps. Fine but how can't my O.S keep track of my deleted apps so that I don't have to remember their names to reinstall them.. I'm just someone who put 5minutes thinking about how to differentiate and alleviate pain points from Android, now imagine what a team of experts in user experience, paid full time could achieve in specifying the ideal smartphone O.S

> Yes dethroning the google play services is a hard goal so here I'm mostly advocating for microsoft to keep the play services

Microsoft can't do a lot of the things you want to improve Android without dethroning Google Play Services. So very much of the "real" Android OS today is closed source and in "Play Services".

That's why Amazon and Samsung (and Cyanogen and its successors like LineageOS and…) have invested so much money into failures at this point!

Android isn't an open source OS. It's a proprietary OS with an open source "crust".

1) The Android Java VM is tied up in lawsuit settlements between Google and Oracle at this point. Even Google likely can't replace it without repercussions or follow up lawsuits. This seems a large part of why Dart seems so important to Flutter and Fuchsia and what have you. (Plus Sun forbid Microsoft from ever touching Java again back in the 90s.)

2) Microsoft already sells/supports what was called Xamarin and is now called MAUI. They also seem to actively contribute to React Native.

Most of the rest I cannot comment on because I'm not an Android user. As a former Windows Phone user, I feel Microsoft had an "ideal smartphone OS" and the market decided it couldn't support it and would rather Google be in charge of a "nowhere close to ideal smartphone OS".

Between their introduction of Surface phones like the Duo, and their Microsoft Launcher, it seems like they're aiming for that down the road.

While we're at it, let's imagine a world where BeOS succeeded on the desktop. People without the technical inclination to run open source would have a choice of multiple competing commercial desktop environments rather than the current duopoly.

I think about this all the damn time. Imagine how much higher quality and stable the software stack would be if Microsoft took all of their lessons working with OEMs, chipset makers (GPUs, etc) for Windows and applied that to mobile. Instead we got an unengineered hot garbage driver interface that broke compatibility with every major android release. Absolute zero continuity across any low level APIs. Camera HAL, HAL 2, HAL 3! Isn’t the point of an abstraction layer to generalize functionality enough that you can grow into future devices and feature sets without a complete redesign of the interfaces? Google has zero vision of where mobile hardware was headed. Android design was built on Google promo culture not product design

> that could sideload any x86 application

Too bad even desktop Windows is pushing for an App Store, gradually taking control away.

I see where this is going. One reason I'd use Windows anymore is if I needed a dedicated GPU now with Windows-only drivers, for its computing efficiency.

I wouldn't count on it being available long-term, as proprietary software eventually loses support and compatibility with the rest of the world.

However, I don't need such special hardware, and I am perfectly happy with an integrated GPU. The heaviest video or massively-parallel tasks that I perform do not warrant a dedicated one, and I run them on my CPU.

The other reason I'd use Windows is if a customer required me to do so (and of course I'd charge for it).

If that happened Android wouldn't exist but funny enough I trust Google more than Microsoft because Google at least pretends it cares with its once famous motto "Don't be evil".

I trust a company a lot more whose business proposition is “I give them money and they give me stuff” than having an ad tech company’s operating system running on my phone.

I like to imagine where the Meego based Nokia N9 was not burnt before launch by MS.

It was far ahead of iphone/android. Things might have been different with it and it's successors.

Why would it be x86? The OS isn't the holdout there. Android even supports x86.

I find it weird how perfectly stable the marketshare is https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide What are the odds.. Edit: actually Apple has gained marketshare in the last few years up to 29% then fallen to 27% and since stagnate to it. Despite being much much more APKs than Ipas (and the gradient likely increasing (any data ?), this doesn't seems to affect much markestshare. What the IOS market needs to fall is to miss some killer apps.

If you increase the timescale, those numbers actually show that iOS has increased its market share by 10% since late 2018, which is also interesting.

Not too long after the introduction of the iPhone SE and Apple keeping older models in their lineup to act as cheaper options to their yearly flagship phone. I'm sure a $399 SE has taken a chunk of Android's market share.

I made the switch to Apple a year ago. I was tired of losing support 12-18 months after purchase and having my phones be practically unusable after 2 years. I have no interest in messing about with 3rd party OSes, I just want a phone that works. So far, I don't regret the change. Check back in a year to see if my battery still holds an all day charge.

Hm, you picked peculiar time to switch considering Samsung announced 4 year support cycles for new phones in Feb 2021: https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-updates-knox-2021-1...

Google did it around the same time.

And a new battery is, what, $50?

Apple didn't need to do anything to get me to finally switch at the end of 2020. Experiencing the constant rug-pulling from being a Google user for the better part of a decade is a better ad campaign for the iPhone than Apple could ever hope to pay for.

One of the final straws for me was when they killed Google Play Music out of nowhere and forced everyone over to YouTube Music which is inferior in basically every way.

The only thing I missed when I first switched was free unlimited Google Photos backups I got with the Pixel phones. It was around that exact same time that the Pixel 5 launched, and Google announces that Pixels no longer get that perk. And the free, compressed tier also uses up your Google Drive space now. That basically cemented my feeling that I made the right decision.

Oh, and then the next major upgrade to Android introduced Material You, forcing you into having a bizarre pastel shade of a color based on your wallpaper across your entire OS, and it looks horrible. Every decision Google has made about Android since I left has only made me more glad I'm not on the Google wild ride any more.

I'm 2 years in and I don't really miss anything about Android.

Since 2009: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide/...

>Despite being much much more APKs than Ipas (and the gradient likely increasing (any data ?), this doesn't seems to affect much markestshare. What the IOS market needs to fall is to miss some killer apps.

Market share doesn't tell the true story. It's all about revenue. Apple generates nearly twice the profits of Google from one third the number of devices.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/01/05/app-store-earns-7...

While a commonly repeated trope, I disagree with it: Play stores apps must pay a 30% comission rate the first year then it drops to 15%. Most of user acquisition of successful apps are made after the first year of existsence. Therefore, the vast majority of Android apps revenue are made with a 15% commission rate vs Apple constant 30% milking. So one could ~say for an equal revenue, Apple will take the double, and since they have ~25% marketshare, then I see no signal of apple users spending more than Android users, however the milking is hard.

Android announced this year that from now one, the comission rate will be 15% even the first year. And 15% is still indecent, people must be really perturbed in modern society to find such power abuse acceptable.

>So one could ~say for an equal revenue, Apple will take the double, and since they have ~25% marketshare, then I see no signal of apple users spending significantly more than Android users, however the milking is hard.

Blood from a stone and all that. You can only milk people for what they've got, and you can bet that Google's 15% number is not coming out of the kindness of their hearts. It's a competitive tactic to lure app developers away from what they know is a more lucrative platform. Point being that Apple users are, on average, much wealthier and more willing to spend money in an app store, and thus much more profitable per MAU.

> Apple users are, on average, much wealthier...

That someone willing to pay for a premium product is likely to be wealthy is a reasonable conjecture for items where the item is so expensive that a typical middle-class customer is making a substantial sacrifice to purchase, if they can do so at all.

So for architect-designed homes, small-volume luxury cars, cigarette boats, personal jets... Absolutely. Middle-class people can and do buy small-volume luxury cars, but it's a big compromise and most of the people driving Bentleys are actually wealthy.

iPhones are not that kind of luxury item, they're what we might call "affordable luxuries." Even the most tricked-out iPhone is within reach of your typical 9-5 full-time employee if they want one.

Other "affordable luxuries" include things like premium alcoholic drinks, expensive basketball shoes, carbon bicycles, and Fashion brands such as Polo Ralph Lauren that specialize in pretending to be exclusive but distributing their wares in department stores.

Owning an affordable luxury in no way suggests you're significantly wealthier than people who buy an affordable substitute for the same product. It's more about signalling taste than means.

Assuming they live on countries where contracts are more relevant than pre-paid phones, and are fine paying the monthly iPhone contract subscription.

Another effect that may be playing into all of this is that Android has a larger share of users who want a phone but not necessarily a smartphone. This demographic is less likely to buy an iPhone and more likely to opt for the cheapest thing on the shelf, which is almost invariably going to be running Android. These users basically do not exist as far as app revenue is concerned.

I don't have links but I've seen reports that on average, iOS users make considerably more heavy use the "smart" features of their phones (and thus, buy and use more apps), which lines up with this. While there are "power users" who make heavy use of Android's more technical features and deep customization, they probably aren't a large enough group to make up the difference.

As I explained in a followup comment, apple users are not paying more, despite the myth.

> Point being that Apple users are, on average, much wealthier and more willing to spend money in an app store, and thus much more profitable per MAU.

No the only maximally pro-thesis consequence you could speculate from data is that Apple users have on average, maximally 15% more money willing to spend. Of course in many cases the fact they pay 50% more to apple (global 15%) does not imply that this excess money would be spent in additional app purchases, only a subset would and spending often have diminishing returns. I would say that the average apple user has 5-8% more money to spend, and as said, in the ridiculously pro-thesis case, 15%. Therefore the effect you're trying to show is in fact very small.

Makes sense - in my experience people with iPhones are more willing to pay for things.

I'm a recent-ish convert and found this to be true, there's definitely plenty of rubbish on the app store similar to the play store and trying to avoid subscription services where it shouldn't be necessary can be frustrating (I'm not paying a monthly fee for a calculator). But so far I've generally been able to find high quality apps that are pay once/sync via icloud/support sign in with apple that means I've spent more money on apps in a couple of years then I did in the previous 10+ with Android

What are the top things you want in a calculator that aren’t included in the default one?

For me, RPN is a big one.

PCalc is my go-to, though most days I reach for the HP 48G that's sitting on my desk.

Awesome. Thanks for the info. I am working on a free open source mobile calculator.

In my experience the apps are more often worth paying for. Probably a viscous circle. Android always feels like a garbage bin I have to scrounge through to find some gems imo.

And this effect is even more profound when looking for tablet optimized apps, which are far and few between on the Play store. There's a few decent ones on F-Droid but iPadOS has the quality tablet app market solidly cornered.

I had an Android tablet, unfortunately not a good experience, especially now I have an iPad. The two are lightyears apart in quality. Apps were indeed a big letdown, only one tablet app on android had a decent photo editor for RAW, while with the iPad, I can do some stuff out of the box and there are a bunch of apps which are really good.

Adding onto that, it's super interesting that the 2011-2012 time period seems to have coincided with the most balanced market shares for both mobile OS and browsers: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-2009...

> Convergence was, if you go back and re-watch that video from the iPhone launch linked above, the big selling point of the iPhone. It is a media player, an internet browser, and a mobile phone all in one. And these days, it is a camera, a satellite navigation system, and a payment card too. So it is not enough to make a good phone, you have to make a good all-of-those-things.

Or people have to be willing to go back to "Not all of this in one thing."

And there are some nice benefits there. "Separate things" don't tend to data mine in the way that modern smartphones do, and I'm not too concerned about my not-at-all-networked camera submitting stuff upstream without me realizing it. I don't mind having music separate again, and I've been re-acquainting myself with internal navigational skills using paper maps and written directions to get around.

It was nice when "all the things" were on a single device, and I've done that, but as I'm more and more opposed to "turning everything I do into extracted behavioral surplus," going back to separate things makes sense - and, realistically, it doesn't suck nearly as much as I expected it to.

I now carry a phone that does calling and texting and... if I'm in the mood for pain, some bluetooth audio to speakers. It'll do calling via BT to the car if I bother to turn it on, and that's about as fancy as I normally get. Though anymore, I'm as likely to forget the phone as not when I go places.

Photos are done with a pocket camera now, going back to that which I did for years. I take fewer photos, but it's fine, and it also means that working on projects I'm documenting, I don't have the distraction of the phone there. I have a camera, and it takes pictures.

It's a different approach to life, more of a return to a 90s/early 2000s approach, but I've been quite happy with it, and find it a welcome change from "Everything in one device."

The fun fact is, that when Purism write convergence, they‘re after what Canonicals' Ubuntu Touch (which sadly is not mentioned at all in the post) meant with Convergence and what Microsoft called "Continuum":

Plugging your phone into a laptop dock or a monitor, keyboard + mouse and be able to use it as a "proper Computer". This requires "convergent apps" which change menus and sometimes even add features when they are run on a larger canvas of pixels. It's supposed to be even more in one device.

Duopolies are a consequence of antitrust law, specifically that the Executive branch fails to apply the law and the Legislative branch keeps it on the books. Given our government, we’re actually fairly fortunate to end up with the Apple/Google duopoly of near peers instead of the asymmetric Intel/AMD chip duopoly or the laughable Google/Mozilla browser duopoly.

Intel/AMD sell chips that you can do what you want with, there are also many skins of open source browser engines, it's asymmetric, but more tolerable than Apple's closed platforms (except the Mac) and Android's sideloading being relegated to an afterthought instead of being a usable feature by the majority. It makes sense why regulators would want to focus on the mobile market.

So big bad Apple caused Microsoft, Nokia, etc not to be able to compete even though they had a multiple year head start and at the time that the iPhone came out, they were both much larger.

Not to mention Rim and Palm were shipping phones for ages.

That many competitors became two is simply proof of my point: a duopoly that cannot consolidate further due to the existential threat posed by an underused ancient law.

So should the government have stepped in to prop up RIM and Microsoft? Should they have forced app makers to support other platforms? What could the government do to help inept competitors?

The government should not be helping inept competitors or propping up minor players. The government should be enforcing antitrust laws on the giants that are too big to fail colluding to workaround antitrust by balancing a duopoly against the interests of the citizenry.

Specifically, what should they be doing? What policies?

You don't seem to be reading what I've written three times now. Perhaps you aren't aware of antitrust law, its purpose, and relevant cases: you might not know about how AT&T ("Ma Bell") was broken up using antitrust law, or how Microsoft was found guilty of abusing its monopoly position by bundling Internet Explorer. Standard Oil was the impetus for the legislation - that's a good one to learn about.

More recently, businesses have created duopolies of convenience and mutual defense. I'm not a fan of this workaround. Please refer to my earlier posts for details.

How should Apple be broken up to make it more competitive? Should they break up Apple into operating systems and hardware and force Apple to license iOS? Should they break Apple up into a computer company and a phone company? Should they create a separate company for computers , iPads, and phones?

If they break Apple up and force it to license it’s operating system, how does that make Apple products better for the end users instead of worse just like Android?

And nothing came of the MS suit. To this day, IE is bundled with Windows and always was.

> nothing came of the MS suit

Microsoft was forced to implement the browser choice scheme which directly led to underinvestment in IE, the rise of Chrome, and the subsequent abandonment of their in-house engine and adoption of Blink. A good case could be made that it led to the rise of Adtech and social media and Apple by democratizing access to the web, similar to how the release of XHRHttpRequest in IE6 led to the downfall of native application development and a shift in Microsoft to cloud-based services.

Microsoft was never forced to have browser choice in the US.

Chrome became popular because it was hawked on the front page of one of the most heavily trafficked sites and it was bundled with other popular downloads.

Apple’s come back started with the iPod - not the Mac.

I find the desktop duopoly even more annoying.

I disagree; I find it harder to migrate away from the iOS/Android duopoly than it is to migrate from the macOS/Windows duopoly. Because so much of modern desktop computing has migrated to the Web, I can use any operating system that supports a modern Web browser. LibreOffice has pretty good compatibility with Microsoft Office file formats for my needs at home; the only time I need Microsoft Office is at work, where I have access to Windows and macOS anyway. I could migrate to Linux or one of the BSDs full time at home if I wanted to (I currently use both FreeBSD and Windows 10), and the only thing I'd lose would be access to some DRM-protected media from iTunes I purchased years ago.

However, if I were to give up my iPhone for a phone running GNU/Linux rather than Android, I'd have to give up many apps that I depend on, some of them with no Web versions. The smartphone situation today feels like how the Linux desktop was in the late 1990s/early 2000s.

Even migrating to variants of android other than the vendor installed one is a major pita, that is only possible for an increasingly small subset of phones.

It's more like a triopoly, isn't it? Linux is a reasonable choice for a consumer OS on laptops/desktops, at least for techies. Much more so than non-Android/iOS options on mobile.

Especially with the work Valve has done to make Linux gaming more easily accessible, even releasing a Linux-based handheld console.

Even non-techies really, as long as you have someone to do that first install since there's very few companies that offer Linux as the default OS for their hardware.

Eh, there's definitely issues where you do a search to see how to change/fix something and the most prominent results tell you to delve into the command line. As long as that's true, it's harder to recommend to non-techies imo.

Chromebooks (yea, not desktop) certainly seemed to show that given the right features there was a place for a 3rd entry in the laptop market place

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/the-worlds-second-mo...

Maybe KaiOS will do the same for phones.

I understand what you mean, but the biggest challenge for me as someone that needs to "get things done" is that I'm forced into a duopoly on desktop /because/ of mobile. I'm perfectly comfortable using FreeBSD as a daily driver on a Thinkpad, and I did for years. I now use a Macbook Pro /because/ I use an iPhone and an Apple Watch. I used to use a Fitbit, and I used to use Android (way back in the beginning), but it quickly became clear that the packaged experience with Apple was simply better (and that Google wasn't a trustworthy player).

If it weren't for the situation with mobile devices (phone / smartwatch), I'd still be using a Thinkpad with FreeBSD for my personal and work computers.

Why do we have a duopoly? You can draw a direct logical line to the complexity of shipping apps through an app store. Right now, an app, say, Spotify, has to create two versions of their app (iOS and Android), and package them for the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

(Buuut that's not even the whole truth. Mobile OS updates frequently break backward compatibility, so iOS and Android apps need to gracefully handle backward and forward compatibility, often special-casing different OS versions or screen resolutions).

Anyway, if, say, Amazon resuscitated their Fire Phone, which would use the Amazon App Store, then Spotify would have to package their app for the Amazon store... which costs developer (or at least a release coordinator) time. That's a barrier to entry that doesn't exist in the PC ecosystem.

> That's a barrier to entry that doesn't exist in the PC ecosystem.

Unless you're using some native language like C++ and cross-platform UI framework like QT or js/Electron you have even bigger diversity problem in the PC ecosystem. There are Windows (x86/arm), macOS (x86/arm), linux (variable desktop environments), Chrome OS, ...

You would need to provide builds for all the OS and hopefully also provide Store versions (Windows Store, AppStore, Snap)

to be fair that is probably a major reason that we haven't seen the year of the linux desktop, and for that matter no other OS has really been able to break the Windows/Mac duopoly in desktop OSes.

I remember that I was ardently hoping that Windows Mobile would fail soon because of the extra cost it added to development. One platform is too little (remember IE6) and three is too much. And yet I work with a Linux laptop but I build web apps deployed to Linux servers.

I think MS will eventually get around to launching a phone again, probably as Android breaks away from Qualcomm.

MS is building laptops around Qcom chips now. That’s a good stepping stone, since you can profitably prototype a on those laptops.

MS has all the core components needed for mobile.

And they're working with Amazon for Android app support on Windows.

If they quietly make that work well (kind of like ChromeOS did) they could just use that on their future mobile OS and it'd go a long way to solve their "no apps" problem.

We will never have good mobile OSs until people acknowladge that "modern" mobile OSs are entirely a regression.

If this ever happens then OSes like PostMarketOS are the future.

Using the Steam Deck makes me wish we had a decent Linux mobile platform.

In theory, the duopoly would be broken by manufacturers from other countries, but those products would just get banned in America.

You can right now buy handsets made even by the US’s primary competitor, China. Go nuts, have a blast.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Huawei+phone

Why do you think this?

Because Hauwei is a competitor from another country but is banned in America

Huawei is banned because they installed backdoors for a hostile foreign government in their devices and got caught. Not "just" because they're foreign.

You can buy lots of Chinese made and foreign-made handsets in the US.

There's plenty of foreign phone manufacturers that sell in America. The idea that the US would ban them solely for being foreign is absurd.

I mean you talk about manufacturers most android phones are not American these days.. We're talking about operating systems where the moat is a lot more about the app ecosystem

Ya, I don’t think the GP is correct either, but I’m sure some people see Hauwei/US relations as part of a great anti-China conspiracy.

it's probably more of a duopsony than a duopoly, judging by their margins

I miss Windows Phone.

Is it really a duopoly, considering that for Google the real users are advertisers not smartphone owners?

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