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...
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.
You might be surprised to hear that the iPhone also doesn't have full disk encryption - it used file based encryption as well.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/262179/market-share-held...
All Meta products are privacy violating trash and wouldn't use them at all.
"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.
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.