1. https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/smartpho...
2. Having access to the premium market is important enough to Google for them to pay Apple $18 Billion a year to be the default search engine on Apple devices
3. Do you think developers are advertisers care more about “market share” or who has disposable income?
2. Airing out Apple and Google's dirty laundry doesn't make either of them look good. If anything, it just confirms that Apple is hopelessly addicted to advertising/promotional money and is willing to put a price on degrading the user experience and giving Google access to your data.
3. Developers care about money, same as Apple does. Long-term, they will not invest in a platform that fleeces them in one hand and exploits them with the other. There are dozens of pain-points where this is showing it's face (payment-processing, app distribution, browser control, file control, background process control, entitlement documentation, double-standards/undertable deals with FAANG, etc.)
Even the web is a smarter target than a native iOS app, because at least you get to keep your profits. That's why the web is winning.
2. Setting Google as the default, and easily changed, search engine does not equate to giving Google access to your data.
3. How long-term are we talking about? Because since 2008, 14 years so far, most investment seems to have been made into the iOS App Store, with more than $260 billion[0] paid to developers so far.
The web is a great target platform, I'm glad we agree! You give up a lot in terms of discoverability and potential promotion, and you have to do some extra work to manage payments and so on, plus you have to overcome the natural distrust for paying a new vendors, but you absolutely do get to keep 100% of whatever you can convince people to pay you, for sure. Or even better, don't charge! That's why the web is... an alternative that isn't losing, let's say.
0. https://www.businessofapps.com/news/apple-paid-out-260-billi...
But it’s not a general purpose search engine.
> Even the web is a smarter target than a native iOS app, because at least you get to keep your profits. That's why the web is winning.
This is a horrible take. It came out in the Epic trial that 80%+ of App Store revenue came from games an in app purchases from “whales”. Not the poor little Indy developer.
Most of the popular non game apps don’t even allow in app purchases like Netflix and Spotify and others allow you to purchase the service either in or out of the App Store
I think the reason parent leaned on that sub-group is that it is easy to move a lot of units at the very low end with minimal or even negative profit, and that was definitely Samsung's (to name one company) approach in years past. They would sell many, many Android phones at something like $100 each, in some cases losing money on every sale, and very, very few of the higher-margin profitable phones that most people on HN think of when they think of Samsung Android phones.
That's how, for example, iPhone accounts for 75% of all profit in the smartphone market worldwide, despite a low 13% market share[0].
When it comes to the big numbers, most people aren't really comparing Apples to apples.
0. https://www.imore.com/apple-takes-75-smartphone-profits-desp...
Never encountered this?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/v7a7s3/your_phone_s...
I am not a teenager and I do not care about status symbols, but I too have an immediate negative reaction to green bubbles. iMessage Internet-based delivery system is just sooo much better than an SMS one. “Message failed to deliver, repeat?” - what’s not to dread here.
Journos though seem to constantly ignore technical, engineering differences between solutions which make people prefer to use one or another. Probably conspiracy theories sell better.
iMessage doesn't mean anything to me anymore. Apple waited too long and didn't open it up when they should have, same mistake BlackBerry made.
iOS will not let you do this natively, you have to add a call recording service via a three-way call whereas I can do this out of the box with /e/OS on a Fairphone.
I completely understand why Apple won't allow it from a third party: that's a security and privacy nightmare.
I even somewhat understand why Apple hasn't developed such a feature themselves: it's a very minority use case and has some legal concerns in some jurisdictions.
But the end result is, yes, iOS is not for anyone that needs to record calls like that.
Manga reader - there are options, but less convenient than on Android.
https://www.sammobile.com/news/average-selling-price-samsung...
The ASP of the iPhone for the same year was $800.
https://www.statista.com/chart/15379/iphone-asp/
Who do you think has the better business model?
But Apple has been selling electronics that cost more than its competitors since 1980.
If they don't want to sell to everyone, that's fine, but if most people can't afford your product, you're not going to win the market by definition. They could sell their phones for way cheaper, but they don't want to, why? Because less profit.
Guess we should define what Winning means
For a for profit company, profit is winning. “Market share” never paid a bill. There is a reason that Apple has been one of the three most valuable companies in the US since 2011.
They almost went bankrupt once because:
- supply chain issues: they thought that users wanted low end Macs and they manufactured too many of them and not enough high end Macs. Everyone agrees that Apple now is the best in the world when it comes to managing their supply chain
- the processors they were using were behind performance wise. It was hard to compete when Apple was only selling a few million Macs and Intel could throw money at performance thanks to having the entire PC market. Now Apple sells about as many ARM based devices as the entire personal computer market (not including servers) and has higher margins to invest. Again no one is saying that Apple doesn’t have the best processors.
- the operating system was far behind the competition. That’s definitely not the case now. Apple has shown to be far more nimble than its competitors.
- there was a dearth of software for its platform. Now that’s definitely not the case except for computer games . The PC gaming market is small and declining.
- They didn’t have any cash on hand. Apple has $200 billion in cash now and it’s doing all it can to throw off cash via stock buybacks and dividends. It could easily have more if it saw that it needed it down the road
https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/sectors/sp500-compa...
The question behind the question is can a closed ecosystem survive? Will the open competitor replace it over time? The closed ecosystem company always has to invest more money because it's not shared between multiple other companies.
If the latest iPhone doesn't have the feature you need, you have to leave the ecosystem
Amused to see that Microsoft is releasing a new product to cache Microsoft updates for Windows users, that runs in Linux on Docker
Having 70% of the profits in the phone market, with Samsung being a distance second and the rest of the manufacturers scraping by, I would say yes.
> The question behind the question is can a closed ecosystem survive?
You realize that Macs have survived along side Microsoft based PCs for 40 years? For 26 of those years (1984 -2006 and 2020- present) even using a different processor?
> Will the open competitor replace it over time? The closed ecosystem company always has to invest more money because it's not shared between multiple other companies.
You realize that Apple has more money than all of the other “multiple companies” combined? Who has the money to invest in processor research and manufacturing (Apple invest billions in TSMC for its manufacturing capacity).
Apple has been ahead processor wise in mobile for over decade and now is ahead in personal computers.