Apple overtakes Android to pass 50% share of smartphones used in US
ft.com
ft.com
You don't see the same trend in the rest of the world where 3rd party messengers (Whatsapp, Viber, Line, snapchat, etc) are mostly used for comms.
The inability of iPhones to easily host 'cracked' apps also acts as an anchor to adoption - theres a lot of people hooked on their cracked ad-free spotify or youtube apps, or games with 'everything free'.
I wouldn't want to be part of the team having a deadline of March to develop and implement a way for every big messaging app to interoperate, with different user models, privacy concerns (e2e?), data storage models, data durability models, etc.
Yet if it launches late, you have that 10% of revenue fine hanging over you, which is huuuuuuge. And the EU probably won't listen to you when you say "we implemented this API but their API was incompatible with ours".
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/07/05/eu-approves-landmark-le...
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
You might be surprised to hear that the iPhone also doesn't have full disk encryption - it used file based encryption as well.
I have no idea what it's like in 2022, but it was such a horrible experience.
On a similar note, Pegasus has me unable to get an iPhone even if I wanted to.
There might be some multi step exploit that requires me to download an app from an external source, but nothing like the 0 clicks.
It would be nice to see some evidence of this. It seems less complicated to me.
Particularly among young people, Android phones have a reputation for being trash, and they are the equivalent of my generation's store brand shoes.
Apple is better at selling phones. Aside from better ads, they have prominent stores in most major cities. If you want to see the latest Pixel phone, you're going to have to visit a carrier store or Best Buy. As bad as an Apple store might be today, stepping into a T-Mobile store is worse.
I don't think the iMessage effect is what it used to be. My kids (in Texas) communicate on Discord mostly. I think they use Snapchat too. Text messages are pretty much only used to message their parents or to get a ping when their restaurant table is ready.
To me, it feels like Google has lost interest in Android and consumers will pick that up as well.
Android people usually do. That doesn't make it entirely true, though.
The overall experience of using an iPhone is, for most people, more consistent and smooth. You're correct to note network effects, but I think you overstate the importance of iMessage for most people. I don't really care if you're green or blue in my text window, and I don't think many people really do. What I do care about and enjoy is the overall platform effects, including easy integration with my Mac, the way the watch works with it, etc.
You could cobble together most of that, I assume, with utilities and whatnot using Linux or Windows and Android, but with Apple all that comes out of the box.
>As bad as an Apple store might be today,
The Apple Store experience is insanely streamlined, easy, and creepy up-sell free compared to a carrier. That's a big deal.
>To me, it feels like Google has lost interest in Android and consumers will pick that up as well.
I'm an iPhone person, but yeah, I think there's something to this, too.
There are a lot of people who do care, especially in group chats. There's an experience downgrade when an Android user is added to a group chat.
Google has a NYC store, with a second one also in NYC that recently opened. Seems like they want to keep going there.
I'm in Austin and Google has a sizable presence here. They have offices (I've gone to seminars they host), it's a Google Fiber city, lots of schools use Chromebooks and Google Classroom, and it's become a tech hub.
There are Apple stores in malls and those malls all have lots of vacancy. It's a no-brainer that if Google were going to have stores anywhere, they would have them here.
Also, FWIW, the store is pretty nice! Has a much warmer feel than an Apple store.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/262179/market-share-held...
"Messages" is the name of the app, and it hosts both iMessage conversations and vanilla SMS conversations.
Personally, I can't imagine being willing to use a proprietary messaging app owned by Facebook for any significant part of my online communication.
Using Messages, my contacts aren't "in an app", they belong to my phone (and to my iCloud account, since I use that service). Any messaging app that I am willing to grant permission to has access to them.
Also, iMessage conversations are end-to-end encrypted, and Apple has shown, repeatedly over the years, that they have no interest in mining them for saleable data.
All Meta products are privacy violating trash and wouldn't use them at all.
Cracked spotify (premium), snapchat (screenshotting messages without notifications), and various games seem to be the most common.
Spotify surprises me because I would think the API is locked down and requests are authenticated. I guess it's abusing the free tier and spoofing the request to avoid rate limits?
Doesn't mean that there is a correlation. In the EU iPhones are way more expensive than competitors. The difference is bigger than in the US.
Having the actual price partially swallowed in business rebates or scaled into years of monthly charges changes the optics in term of price and the option to afford "luxury"
There's really nothing clever going on. People prefer good products over less good ones.
I used iOS first and android here and then, keeping a middle tier device officially for testing, and privately to see what goes on on the other side. Up until around the last Nexus phone, I agree it was pretty bad. Not unusable, but with very little upside.
I completely switched with the Pixel 4a, and it’s a very good experience with very little downside. Still waiting to see what comes from Apple next week before buying my next phone, but I’m not seeing myself going back to Safari and iCloud if it’s just incremental improvements.
Or does Apple allow third-party apps to handle SMS? If so, that would be news to me...
Unsurprisingly, iPhone has a pretty damn high penetration rate in Japan where it costs about as much as the US, because there's fewer trade barrier there.
Also note that your issue is not with Android, it's with moto.
Pixel, Huawai in the past, Xiaomi all allow to use stock android and remove any apps.
As the battery wore down, the phone would still function, just slower for peak CPU demand. Other devices would just die and people would buy new ones, so not throttling had the effect of people buying newer devices more often than needed.
The main issue is they should have alerted people that performance was degrading so they could get a new battery.
Assuming the answer is "no", then Android doesn't actually grant you meaningfully greater freedom in this regard than Apple does: you're just upset about the communication around a particular feature/bug-workaround that requires underclocking the phone temporarily in certain situations.
Are Apple laptops repairable by you?
If your beef with Apple is the lack of repairability of their phones and laptops, then you do you. Personally, I have no problem with it, because it's a tradeoff that gets me laptops with higher build quality in a smaller package.
But if your stated beef with Apple is something that isn't true or doesn't make a lick of sense, I'm gonna call it out, if only to help reduce the degree to which the false narrative about the throttling spreads.
The price differences between Android and Apple still strike me as absurd. On the other side, I went from "picking an Android very carefully for rooting" gradually to "what's on sale at Best Buy for about 150" with no major shift in experience or quality.
It’s decent hardware and a consistent experience- sure, there have been misses, and sometimes there are non-Apple products that are better. But there is no other single company that offers a competitive watch, tablet, laptop, and phone. Not everyone needs this, which is why basically 50% of people aren’t in the Apple ecosystem. But it’s a legitimate draw for many people. And make sure that you don’t fall in the trap of thinking “just because Apple products aren’t right for me, then everyone that uses them must be an idiot.” You pay for the convenience, but for many people that is worth it, and the fact that not every Apple product is #1 is okay. Basically every Apple product line has something in the top 3.
Apple is like the Disney of the tech world- there are other companies that make good movies, and there are other companies with cruise lines and theme parks, but nobody else that does all that. They stand alone in terms of their breadth and consistency.
I would say that most other things are on par with other devices/brands, and so you would trade on individual things that you prioritize- screen quality, battery life, compatibility with particular software, etc. And there are a couple small areas in which Apple probably doesn't make sense. For basic video editing, I might still use Apple devices. But if I was creating a rendering farm for an animation studio, I'd probably build servers with video cards and parts that weren't Apple.
Well a lot of people can very clearly tell the difference between a middle of the pack iPhone and a $150 Android device. That you experienced no such variation among the Android lineup is why people prefer Apple. It "feels like" a premium product, is priced like a premium product, and is perceived as a premium product because... you guessed it: it's a premium product!
Edit: So to clarify, you could be saying "there is something better about Apple" or "Apple people are complete suckers." Which is it?
1) Many people can't specifically identify and articulate which characteristics lead them to prefer one product over another.
2) Many people have different reasons for preferring the same product over the same alternative
3) An individual is probably preferring a set of characteristics that overdetermines their preference (i.e. if you remove one of the set, their preference still doesn't change) and the set is comprised of individually not-very-important characteristics.
Would you be confused if someone said that they prefer a Porsche Panamera over a Honda Civic? They could probably say they prefer the size of the Panamera, but that's clearly not sufficient explanation because they also would prefer it over a CR-V. Then they'd say the materials used are better. But would they now accept a CR-V with the interior redone in ultra-premium materials? Very unlikely.
The reality is that their preference is a complex mixture of things that they struggle to even detect never mind articulate. "Good product companies" get this, and bad product companies just stare in befuddlement at why their CR-V with fancy leather isn't outcompeting Porsche. Of course when you ask someone to explain their preference, they cannot. They don't have the language to describe it! It's a silly question to even ask!
I find much more value in the view that a great product is the confluence of millions of tiny, apparently inconsequential decisions. It seems completely believable that if the product developers are successful, I as the consumer would struggle to reverse engineer what all of those decisions are by looking at the finished product.
Not sure what analogy you're getting at with crack. Separate from the moral valence you're trying to ascribe to it, of course it's a great product in some respects. Though I'd suggest that explaining why a single molecule that interacts ~directly with the brain's reward system is a "good product" is much easier than something like a smartphone or car.
[0] One example I happen to know about had to do with the really complex machining that was required on one of the iPhones (forget which) to make the bevel around the screen bezel wrap around the corner in a way that felt (but was not actually) "flat" relative to the straight-line parts of the bevel. Without this multi-axis beveling, which was apparently a complete nightmare to figure out how to manufacture, the corners would've "seemed" sharper. Does that mean someone would pick up an iPhone and remark how nice it is that the corner bevel rotates another 3 degrees or whatever? Obviously not. Does that mean this was a complete waste of time? No one knows. Apple's market cap, margins, adoption, and consumer loyalty point toward them doing something uniquely right though.
The ability that you have to equate affinity/addiction to "good/quality" is downright creepy, and sadly symptomatic of literally the worst bits of all of technology.
If you're operating in real life like this, please stop.
"Good product," at least in English, generally means "a product that people successfully and happily use for its intended purpose." It doesn't usually mean "a product that does good in the world." There are plenty of very good products that don't do good things in the world. If you're operating in real life as if these are inseparable features of an object, please stop.
Well, I suppose you can carry on. Again, if it's useful for you to believe everyone else is an idiot and that, now, good product == product that does good, go ahead. I think this is a very low-resolution picture of reality though, and is probably the source of some of your confusion.
It is absolutely the case that the definition you are using can serve as a technically correct one. But that's not very important. What is important is that real people are being harmed by exploitative technology, and you handwaving that away as if it should be a dismissable part of the conversation is you doing a bad thing.
In my experience iphone users carry a powerbank with them.
2nd hand phones with non replaceable batteries are not worth paying much.
My iPhone on the other hand, I am still on my first one, and it is 4 years old and still gets updates. And judging by history, it should still get updates for at least another 2-3 years. Apps don’t crash. The battery is just starting to go on it, but a replacement isn’t very expensive. And the entire Apple “ecosystem” is optional here. Apple is just starting to spin up an ad ecosystem, but the privacy features of the device are quite unparalleled (although I wish I were able to install an on device ad blocker that actually works)
Their android flavor is nothing like stock android, buggy and gets barely updated. The phones to expensive for the actual build quality.
Samsung is just the most ugly side of Android. A pixel or even a Xiaomi that ship with stock and allow removing unwanted apps without hacks is not even compareable.
I can only recommend Xiaomi, cheap, very good build quality and you don't need to hack or root anything and still have full control over your phone. I've had a cheap Oppo before and it drowned, fell and more and still goes strong 8+ years later.
In iOS I can choose to use different providers for email, calendar, and password management or remove the apps (for the first two).
2) Long support which makes the price really reasonable. I've been using an iPhone 8 for a couple of years now, and still have the latest iOS version and the phone works good enough. If I would have bought an Android phone when I bought my iPhone I would have needed to replace it already, because of lack of updates.
My Google account for my phone is just for that nothing else. My last phone cost $120 and lasted 6 years, it still works but doesn't run my banking app anymore. my current one was $250 and last for 2 years without issues already.
And I checked on my old Android phone, an Nokia 6.1, which is supposed to have stock Android, and I can't delete these apps: calendar, drive, lens, gmail, chrome, files, photos.
[0] https://www.macworld.com/article/673831/how-to-use-an-iphone...
Every phone I owned in the last 10 years allowed full control about apps without root. That's a nexus, a cheap Oppo and now a Xiaomi.
Edit:// I thought you need an account to activate the iphone? Not sure if I am totally wrong
I write code and setup cloud infrastructure for a living.
If you have absolutely no interest in phones, the base iPhone will be a better device than any android of the same price in terms of stability (years of use) and support (you'll hit not mobile website that doesn't handle it, any major app provider will support it)
android has advantages only if you actually have specific aspects you want to optimize (price, performance, photo, obscure tools, versatility etc..)
Now with Apple you don't have a choice in hardware, you can't buy low-cost or mid range. You have to make the choice the make for you. Thiw works for me because I've never had better hardware in my life. I've had a MBP and an iPhone for 2 years and they're still as strong and efficient as the first day. The only non Apple device I still have are my Jabra earbuds, but the left one is randomly dying now. Can't to buy Airpods Pro instead :)
150. I have chosen the price point of 150. Whatever's on sale at Best Buy for that. Maybe Costco.
I am around Apple people. With the exception of that cross device thing which I concede can be a big deal for some, I have not dealt with or seen any significant differences between their experience and mine.
Apple just isn't as competitive for new devices.
Obviously, you can save some money by buying an older phone with better hardware features, but the same applies to Android -- this year's "mushy middle" of pricing is occupied with last year's flagship model.
I also have a Mac, AirPods, and an Apple Watch, though. That makes it kind of a no-brainer which phone I carry around with me.
This depends on where you’re located though — in some places it’s much easier to get quick OEM repairs for (some) Android devices than for Apple ones.
The A-series chips are also genuinely very good, but one could argue that a lot of that power is wasted on iOS.
Anecdotally, I’ve also found battery life on iPhones to be more reliable out of the box than on most Android devices, especially in standby.
Before this I had the Nexus 6P, which despite being a Google branded phone, only got updates for three years. If you amortize the cost of the phone over five years instead of three, it suddenly makes the Apple phones seem like a deal.
For me Android is like an off-brand cola. It gets the job done. It’s sugar water, just like coke. But there are a million little decisions that make Coke a better product.
Which means 0 chance of getting apps with no tracking.
How do i know? check stats from porn websites :)
https://www.pornhub.com/insights/yir-2021#Devices-Technology
I dont think one can exclude enterprise here
The best apps on the App Store are unique to iOS, and Android apps always feel like an after thought, and many of the best iOS apps do not have Android counterparts.
Apollo for reddit, CoPilot for money management, Flighty for flight tracking, Foreflight for aviation, Halide for camera, Things/Muse for notes and todos, Overcast/Castro for podcasts, Tweetbot/Twitterific twitter, even Spark for email use to be iOS only for years.
I challenge you to compare the quality of iOS only vs Android only apps.
The iOS dev community seems vibrant, and I wish I could say the same for Android.
After 10+ years of making apps, the discussion with new clients is still the same here (EU/USA) every time:
Client: we want an app
Me: iOS or Android or both?
Client: both
Me: Ok, which one first?
Client: iOS, I have an iPhone 13 Pro max, make it work on that!
... app designed and built in close co-op with the client
Me: What do you think?
Client: Great! Publish it! Let me put it on my phone!
Me: shall we do the Android design? On which phone types should it work; premium or also mid or budget?
Client: Who cares, just do something and publish it whenever. Here is money, Bye!
On iOS we inevitably made anywhere from 2x to 10x the amount of money through IAPs. No matter how good or fast the Android app was, no matter how many good reviews, no matter if we saw 2x or 3x or 4x as many installs on Android.
If our clients wanted to actually profit, the answer was clear: do iOS first, and then decide whether an Android version is even necessary.
I have a Samsung Galaxy S4, it is still a very usuable phone and is running a modern android version and gets regular updates. Sure it is a bit slow and I had to flash a custom rom (/e/os) but that is not hard to do.
This phone is now almost 10 years old, but still gets updates and can run most apps. I don't think this can be done with an iphone.
> ... I had to flash a custom rom (/e/os) ...
> ... 10 years old, but still gets updates
It's e/OS that's getting regularly updated, right?
If you had never flashed a custom rom and stayed with Samsung's Android that came with the phone, would you still be receiving regular updates?
> can run most apps
Curious to know what apps haven't run on your phone?
I don't stay with the original OS on my PC why would I do the same with my phone. If my original PC OS stops getting updates I change to a newer one. I figured most here would be used to that.
Uber, that I can remember. Didn't like the micro g aspect, but I hear that may have changed. Also banking apps but I don't use those myself.
Tech people excluded because they have other niche reasons for their smartphone choice.
$30/month (for a maxed out phone; you could be looking at $12/mo) is much more palatable to a lot of people than paying the full sticker price today.
When you can't afford it, you finance it. A iphone is $30/month. It's a status symbol for the lower class. It doesn't do much for status when you make 6 figures.
By some accounts, Apple already had >50% marketshare in the US but FT's source is probably more reliable.
Is there any development ongoing for a mobile OS that is not full of crap like Android, but not as restrictive as iOS?
Not sure if Windows Phone or PalmOS were like that, but those are both gone…
Never used PalmOS to comment.
I think third place these days is Tizen which is in a worse place than the two big ones for apps, and then fourth might genuinely be GNU/Linux but there's massive dropoffs between third and fourth, and between second and third.
iirc third place is KaiOS, a proprietary fork of the discontinued FirefoxOS [0]. It's primarily used on feature phones though. As for app support, an official youtube and whatsapp app are available on KaiOS.
It's available on a few devices (I have it running on a pinephone; also tried running on a galaxy 4 but got stuck in a boot loop). The wiki is a bit out of date, but there is an active community on their IRC [1].
Not trying to attack but can you explain what you mean with that?
There are at least 200 current android phone models and at least 50 popular flavours of android around.
Sure you don't find a stock Samsung phone feeling 'luxury' but even a cheap Xiaomi with cleaned up stock android feels 'luxury' to me.
android is not full of crap if it doesnt come preloaded with it. the google apps , which you can download are pretty great and the interface can be replaced with another launcher. The app selection in the stores seems identical to me
Frankly - I don't like Apple or Google, and I'm damned tired of being sold hardware that has software locks I'm not given a key to (And at least in this case, Google is better - so I'm still on android hardware for now).
But what I really want is a linux phone at this point. Google had exactly the same reputation 20 years ago that Apple has now (height of the "do no evil" stage). It turns out that companies literally cannot help themselves.
So just like I've moved almost exclusively to linux on non-work computers, I plan to move exclusively to a free OS on my phone hardware. Right now that's un-googled forks of android, but I genuinely hope to see usable phones running on debian/arch/etc in the very near future. We're tantalizingly close with things like the pinephone pro, and the librem.
I was able to use the non-pro pinephone as a daily driver for a bit, and it worked, but not well. And despite sounding negative - that's frankly a huge jump from where we were 5 years ago when a working linux phone (in any shape) was mostly a pipe-dream. I think there's a lot of interest in this area right now.
which distro were you running on the pinephone? If you haven't tried out PureOS yet, I'd recommend giving it a shot. The Phosh UI has improved a lot, firefox is now installed by default and scales well, and a lot of usability issues have been fixed. For some workloads, its actually works pretty well as a daily driver.
At the time (about 10 months ago) it was the most solid I could find. I'm a little out of date at this point, but I'll probably check back in on it some time in the next few months.
And I agree - even at the time it was a usable phone. A tad slow for my tastes, but hard to argue with the performance given the low cost of the hardware.
And yet I'm going back to iOS when the next iPhone launches due to iMessage. I hate it, and I don't want to. But the simple fact of the matter is, I have become somewhat of a social pariah in my circles with people constantly making remarks about how I break their group chats. People refuse to download a platform agnostic messaging app. Women have made judgements toward me, which does not help as a single man.
I genuinely don't think anyone means to behave in such an elitist/condescending way because many of these people are those I know well and who I would consider great people. It's this bizarre tribalistic and subconscious pattern of behavior that the overwhelming majority of people around me in the social circles I engage with all exhibit.
It all seems so dumb when everyone could download an app like Signal and be done with this, and it feels extra annoying that I'm supporting Apple by buying their phone that is expensive, and in my opinion, has worse software despite the fact that they have created this issue entirely. Yet it's not a hill I want to die on. Hopefully Android tablets improve, and I can get one of those to replace the lost functionality by moving back to iOS.
A large thing I'll miss about Android is that I never spent a single dollar on an App despite having all my needs taken care of, largely thanks to F-droid. Not looking forward to reverting to figuring out which iOS apps won't pull the rug out from under me and switch to subscription based models in basic apps like podcast players and calendars. On the bright side, there are many beautifully made apps by indie developers on iOS that are lacking on Android, and I'm happy to pay for if they support single payment models.
Now all I need is a better Wifi Hotspot app so I can use it as a 5G router (low latency, channel selection etc)
Also, clearly Samsung has tried to take up the premium approach (as well as every other tier)
Hard to believe the difference. Android is really bad at many things, and I had a good brand (One Plus 6).
Taking a picture on Android is an awful experience. The Camera app takes about 3 seconds to open, and freezes for a second when taking a picture.
The Camera app on iPhone opens instantly and takes photos instantly.
The quality of the pictures taken on the iPhone are also much much better.
I don't like the closed model of the iPhone, but the quality is currently unbeatable.
For me (and I think most people) the two are very substitutable. One is a Toyota Camry and the other is a Honda Accord. They are both fine.
Everyone I know who uses an Android is frustrated with it all the time.
I'm sure the people who make Android also think it's fine. You just tap the button and then an app opens. Who cares if it's janky and freezes half the time? Certainly Android developers don't seem to care.
At one point, I remember certain google sites displaying differently (and in an obstructive way) when I would browse from Firefox, but not from Chrome.
Conversely, Firefox is the only app that lets me clean up bad site practices (eg: by using Kill Sticky). Conversely to that, in Android I have browse on FFx 68 because newer FFx (still!) has mostly non-existent extension support.
So it's unclear when someone says "they feel very similar" without saying what "they" are.
Good brand. Terrible camera app. I carry a OP6 and the awfulness of it's camera is legendary. Besides what you mentioned, the camera app is often incapable of focusing. To deposit checks, I have to use an old phone.
That and the utterly dismal battery life (drains fast with heavy use) will make this my only OP device. I accept good brand but I wouldn't go as far as good phone.
All that said, even this OP6 is still a better option for me than an Apple phone. My first and foremost requirement will always be rooting.
Most people have seen this coming as soon as Google fought the concept of letting people switch the search engine, the browser, core defaults on Android. I would say "I can't blame them" but seeing that they want both eating the cake & keeping it, I won't.
On Apple: great hardware, everything on the OS is nice out of the box. Thought went into everything from colours to fonts to make it nice. The phone lasts for years and years. Apple doesn’t seem quite so underhanded.
Now, we spend lots of time with our phones. Getting one that is nice and feels snappy to use makes every day 0.5% better. Combined with the fact that iPhones last longer and have resale value, for most people, it’s a no-brainer even at a much higher cost.
In fact, the cheaper Androids get, the worse the perception of them will get.
So maybe a future folding Pixel sways me back to Android but I'm happy iOS has got rid of the jank at the OS level yet Android is still tuning some threadpool or something after all these years.
That’s the most ridiculous statement I’ve seen today, bar none.
Isn't Apple at risk of losing its air of exclusivity if this continues?
Among my 100k-300k/yr friends, it's about a 50/50 split. My tech friends nearly exclusively android, my wife's medical friends, iphones with a few exceptions.
I'm personally loving my new phone I got last week. It has an aux port!