Report reveals Android users switching to iPhone at 5-year high
9to5mac.com
9to5mac.com
I’m not flaming Google or Android. By “competition” I mean “a mobile OS vendor who cares primarily about their users, and acts in their benefit.” Today mobile vendors pick Android because it allows them to cheaply treat their users like chattel.
Those vendors act in predictable old ways — attempting lock-in; adding half-assed features behind subscriptions gates; shoddy cloud services which will be abandoned in 18 months; dark patterns to trick people further into their channels; difficult, delayed, or non-existent OS and security updates.
I wish Microsoft had been more on-the-ball. Their phones were roadkill, from a market standpoint, but at least they were trying. Some of their ideas and their execution were quite good. Say what you will about their enterprise focus, at least they don’t institutionally treat users like krill, the way Google does. And the way Android affords mobile vendors to.
Of course that ended up having a massive negative effect on the willingness of developers to support these platforms.
If the argument is that they just weren't good enough, then nobody should be complaining today seeing as we now have by definition the best mobile platform in iOS.
If I sound bitter it's probably because I still think back fondly to my Nokia Lumia devices. :(
Nokia wasn’t doing that well initially responding to Apple but I think they may have done better that what Microsoft tried to do.
The reason that this is the only way to create a viable business is because your competition will be doing it.
Unfortunately, non-technical customers will eventually fall into one of these traps as long as one of your competitors is doing it. Therefore, it is only a matter of time after one company deploys the regressive standard, before everyone else copies it (or goes out of business).
The phrase they like using is "leaving money on the table".... makes me think of tipping...
Only if you choose to play in that market. If your goal is to make thin margins on undifferentiated products, sure, lard up your cheap-ass product with a bunch of useless shit to capture the unwary. Better to play in another pool.
it seems that in every market it's only a matter of time until the barrier to entry becomes low enough that people with scruples suddenly need not apply
I'm right there with you.
In fact, I'll state an even stronger position: I wish there were at least 3-5x more choices of platform for all form factors of computing device.
The duopoly that developed during the '90s was so clearly unhealthy, and yet it has set the expectations for OS competition so completely that many people seem to think it is an inevitability.
If we had a half-dozen or more mainstream OS choices, there would be massively more pressure for interoperability. That would mean that rather than lock-in, the various OS vendors would have to compete on things people actually like.
Now, just as you, I am a happy Apple user, and have been since before Jobs' return as iCEO. From where I sit, Apple does very much try to provide things that users want, to some extent...
...but if they had 4 more real competitors, there's much more chance that some of them would be providing many of those same things, and thus pushing Apple to do better and be better (just as you implied, indeed).
First it was resistive touch screens
Then it was symbian not adapted for touch , then meego not merging with symbian
They just got lost in their own thoughts
As with a lot of things, Microsoft was walked over by their partners. Either the abysmal third-party hardware they were forced to support, or even how Verizon screwed them over on their Kin phones.
I'm not going to switch back for only one reason: iMessage. I'm using a phone/OS that I absolutely loathe every day and causes me rage aneurysms, but the iMessage network effect is too strong for me to switch back.
This is why regulators need to do something about the wireless market (operating systems, carriers, and app stores). These companies don't have to compete the way they should.
Example: it takes me far longer to highlight or otherwise manipulate text than it would on Android or a computer. No, it's not a familiarity issue.
Ugh, I'm with you on that one. When I switched to iOS two years ago, I was astonished by how hard it was to select text, or even just move the cursor while you're typing.
Related: the swipe keyboard on iOS is so much worse than Android. It Tries to be Helpful by Capitalizing random Words, then when you backspace to remove those words, you realize it has introduced some secret markup into the text, so that the word you replace it with is also capitalized. Gets me every time.
I was happy with my Android phone, but at the time when I needed to get a new one, Apple was doubling down on (its marketing message about) privacy, and I naively bought into it. Shortly afterwards, they announced your phone would be scanning every image and reporting back to Apple.
You can long press on the space bar and move the cursor around quite well, just a tip.
Apple is still orders of magnitudes better from a privacy perspective, and there is no photoscan-and-send-back-to-mothership anywhere. Hell, the whole point of that would have been to enable real e2e photo storage, while they also not hurt any laws (which is not clear on storing child porn on their servers, even if its encrypted).
Yeah, this is a weird issue on iOS. I feel like it has regressed in the last few years too. It used to work better. Maybe Apple just feels like cut/copy/paste isn't something people should be bothering with on phones?
Like, the rest of the world uses either WhatsApp, Telegram or litany of other choices, the US were just rich enough to buy enough iphones that this effect somehow took hold (plus the strange addiction to SMS due to carrier plans, while we had to quickly forget about it in other places because with non-ascii characters it sucked even more so).
And then they all go and do the same craziness where they work. For instance one can feel that the UX people at Microsoft aren't using Windows as their daily driver. If they did, they would for instance not have wrecked the task bar in W11.
I agree with you about the opacity of gestures in iOS. I don’t like it. I’m used to it, and find many of them to be handy shortcuts, but the lack of discoverability for new users is not good.
What is so bad that it's provoking this response? Not that I love everything about iOS, but that's a pretty intense reaction.
The biggest problem is notifications. On Android, you use the volume rockers and "do not disturb" mode. That's it. If you press the volume rockers down, the notifications will become quieter until they get to "vibrate only" and then finally "silent". The screen shows you this is happening, and there's always an indicator on the phone.
In iOS, there are three different things that affect notifications: 1) Focus, 2) volume settings (if you have that setting turned on), and 3) the physical DnD switch.
The physical switch is dangerous to use because it's easy to forget you used it.
A lot of the rest of my issues are with Siri. Speech recognition is worse than Microsoft's was in the year 2005. It just doesn't work most of the time.
The rest is the UI. Apple's ethos is to hide everything from the user, which they think is "simple" but is incredibly complex.
There are a million hidden, inconsistent gestures that you absolutely need to know to use the phone. You just have to mess around until you find them, and then they're impossible to remember because they differ between apps.
Then there are things you can only do with Siri! For example, I can delete all my alarms with Siri, but there's no way to do it using the UI.
Actual beeps and trills all day would be amazingly annoying.
All Android tablets seemed to be crap, and I got an iPad.
I absolutely hated it. I hate the interface, I hate how iOS works, and I hate how after some years Apple effectively made it absolutely useless. I left it in a recycle bin, promising myself I would never buy another of their products.
I used MacOS and iPhone later because those are the machine and on-call phone issued by my employer. Still absolutely hate the interface on both, and I wonder how people put up with this crap.
I disagree with most of what you wrote, but this we can agree on!
> "I'm not going to switch back for only one reason: iMessage"
Weird. Here in the UK there is no iMessage network effect whatsoever because everyone uses WhatsApp for everything. Nobody ever sends me an iMessage unless they're American, or their my Mum who I suspect just hits the wrong app icon sometimes...
Yet this doesn't stop a lot, probably a significant majority of people I know, from buying iPhones.
I'm not sure why any of the regulations proposed would open up iMessage. How would regulations force Apple to develop iMessage for Android?
> allow third parties to inter-operate with the gatekeeper’s own services in certain specific situations
[0] https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...
Is it the color of the bubbles? That seems to be a US only issue. Most of the other countries barely use SMS and use WhatsApp/Telegram/whatever instead.
Do you, dear HN reader, think they will?
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* You can name group chats and give them a custom image / icon (makes it easier find a group in the list). The name and image is applied for everyone in the group, making it a social thing
* You can add / remove someone to a group without having to create an entirely new group chat
* higher quality images / videos
* works over wifi, without a cell signal
* blue bubbles (purely aesthetic, no functional difference, but some people treat it as a status symbol)
———
I really don’t like the lock-in / network effect, but I get why it exists.
It’d be nice if a common standard somehow became widespread.
Note: It seems reactions are sort of working across platform in recent months? Not sure the latest on this.
You will literally lose out on social activities bc of SMS.
You may as well say that not owning a BMW will lose you potential friends because some BMW drivers will sneer at you. Maybe that's true, but who's loss is that really?
As an example; =maybe you have a family/friend group chat of 8 members and you're planning a birthday party or an event. If everyone is in the ecosystem, you can seamless share notes, todo's, hi-res pictures, videos, locations, etc.
Since for whatever reason your family has no idea what Signal/Telegram/WhatsApp are - you take the one person that's not on iMessages (and so preventing the group from using the tools) out of the group and say "Make sure to update so and so on the Notes here" or something. It's a practical decision. Often, that one Android user is the only one on Signal or WhatsApp. So to share pictures, you make a group of everyone on iMessage and send the videos and album over, and then send a separate WhatsApp to that person.
And sometimes you accidentally forget to send that seperate message.
The right answer is to all agree on a fully featured messaging app (For most non-US that's WhatsApp), or for the default messaging to be upgraded.
Then you get to RCS - which Google is now pushing, after going through a dozen (or two?) of their own attempts to lock users in with a bewildering array of conflicting messaging apps.
Apple should support it, although it's a bit rich to see Google try to "shame" Apple into it only because the failed at their execution.
The reason is lack of interest in the details of their very important daily-use tools, instead defaulting to what they are handed.
Happens for many reasons, but none have ever been compelling enough to me to not care about what goes into my vehicle, communications, housing etc and then complain afterward that I didn't know.
Little things add up. Now you’re missing inside jokes, impromptu plans, etc.
So because you weren't an asshole, you were willing to adapt to his use of android. Doesn't that illustrate my point? People who aren't assholes are willing to be flexible. If you had insisted on airdrop or nothing, that would be different.
> but he refused
It sounds like he didn't think the picture was important and only wanted the license plate number. This isn't an android/iphone matter at all.
From people who don't know it's an intentional limitation by Apple.
aka, mostly nontechnical people.
Experiencing this sort of behavior keeps me from believing I am an understanding person.
Queue the onslaught of empathetic "get better friends lol" -- except I've seen this behaviour across so many social circles that even if it was a viable suggestion, there's no certainty the next group would be any better.
The phenomenon you're commenting on/describing happens often, perhaps is even common. But it is not ubiquitous.
Is this a good heuristic for acceptable behavior?
Android at the OS level is great on the Pixel 6 I have, but many of the apps aren’t up to par. This has been my most continuous complaint. Apps like Spotify and Netflix usually have quality and feature parity, but many apps by independent developers do not. Many of the Android utility apps for things like FTP look like they were made for Android 4 “Ice Cream Sandwich” and never updated.
I suspect this is because iOS users are more willing to pay for apps and so that’s where independent developers focus their efforts?
For now iPhone is still my daily driver. The UX and integration across products is a big reason why for me.
I think Android would be more stable of an option if it had leaned in harder to the things that made it special. It should be built around powerful capabilities, not being the cheaper iPhone alternative.
How many people wanted to give "Android" a try and bought a Pixel only to deal with horrible quality control and terrible support? If the phone was half price and allowed you to do crazy things not possible on iOS maybe people would stay.
But right now, people just see it as being worse on the core things most people care about: calls, messaging (especially iMessage), social media, camera, and support... and it's about the same price.
It was clearly a ploy by Apple to push their expensive accessory upgrades. Google et al following suit just to push their own inferior accessories was so short-sighted.
Personally, one of the only things I care about is having a smaller phone. I do not want a brick in my pocket. I do not care about screen size.
I switched around the 10 because at the time I didn't like the offerings (too big, too expensive), and got a motorolla. It was....ok? Widgets were great (although now on iphone), but there were a lot of issues. Not that there aren't with iphone, but it mostly felt like I was trading pretty evenly for good/bad.
The phone lasted a few years, but with major call quality issues for the last 2 that I only stuck out because of the hellscape that is the phone market. When shopping for a new one, once again a smaller phone was my only priority, so I got an SE, because I couldn't find a half decent android that wasn't huge.
This year was the first year I got an older model since I really like the size of the mini. Will likely not get a bigger phone in the future unless it has a killer feature or phones the same size as the mini (hopefully it becomes the SE) is no longer supported
https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/apple-reports-strong...
For the first time, I am seriously considering switching to an iPhone. My parents used iphone since the 3G, so I am very familiar with them.
I have always hope that Android would catch up with iPhone in most metrics, but lately I feel Android is falling further and further behind, paradoxically as Android gains more and more features.. If iPhone does not exist, Android would be seen as perfectly fine. But iPhone does exist, and all the shortcomings in Android sticks out uncomfortably when comparing to iPhone.
1. Crap-tastic stability when Pixel6/Android 12 was released. I have not used a more buggy phone that crashed every week, or crash in the middle of a call, or a long list of bugs that I encountered during my usage. The OS eventually got better after a year of release, but that meant that I had to deal with the bugs for a year straight.
2. Things that work 80% as well as iPhone, but never exceed them. For example the fingerprint reader remains inaccurate for my right thumb, but not for my other fingers. Other issues include performance issues with videos (this got a lot better in the last 6 months), or batter life issues.
3. Everything is disjointed. To view photos, there is a File app, but then there's an Google Photo app. Somehow Favourites are not shared between the 2 apps.
Never had any problems with stability, fingerprint scanner is stellar, and there are multiple apps for... Basically whatever. Just pick your favorite flavor.
And they have 1 feature that kills the iPhone for me. They are not tied to obsolescence. Once OnePlus drops support, I can install DivestOS or LineageOS and the phone keeps working and being up-to-date. I installed DivestOS on my old 6T and it became my backup phone (normally I take it with me when I go hiking or to the beach, just to not have my main device with me in case there's an unfortunate accident). Apple has a tendency to turn old devices into paperweight after a few years.
For example, I recently convinced my father to switch to iPhone after 4 years of Android. Why? The first phone he got was a Galaxy S7 (Snapdragon). After just a year it was extremely slow, crashing all the time, overheating... which turned out to actually be a very, very common problem with the processor (Snapdragon 820). It was Qualcomm's first stab at a 64-bit processor and it showed.
Well... try, try again. Galaxy Note 9. After a year, super slow at everything, even though all he does is browse internet and check emails. Even the Microsoft Outlook app would crash loading Inbox 25% of the time with no other apps open. Battery replacement and factory reset didn't help at all. A few months after that, it started dropping Verizon phone calls at random. Turns out that was another flaw widely reported on their forums, specifically on Verizon, with a botched software update installation for the modem, that if you were unfortunate enough to install, could not be removed or repaired or factory reset. And, of course, Samsung wasn't pushing any updates to fix it. Kind of a really big deal when you are a small business owner.
So iPhone 13 he went. A year and a half later and it doesn't drop calls.
The final straw for me was when I was sitting at home one night and a family member calls me exasperated saying "I've been trying to call you all day". I had no missed call notification and no voicemail notice. Sure enough I log into my voicemail and there is 20+ messages waiting. If Google can't even get basic functionality like CALLING to work I had no intention of sticking around waiting for a future update that would magically fix it.
I made the realization that I need a phone that works and will continue to receive updates for at least 7 years. The Pixel 4 was released on October 2019 and received it's last update from Google in February of this year. The iPhone 6S was released in September of 2015 and it's only JUST reaching EOL after 7 years of continuous support by Apple.
If Google wants to stop the bleeding they are going to need to fix the basics. They are also going to need to pledge to support the phones longer. The fact that I can purchase a $1,000 iPhone and it will last me 7 years vs buying a $1,000 Pixel that will only last me 3-4 years, I don't need to be a mathematician to see which is the better option.
The 820 was the second gen of 64-bit SoCs. The one with heating and efficiency issues was the Snapdragon 810 (and the slower 808).
I moved from a OnePlus 2 with the 810 to the OnePlus 3 with the 820 and it was a day/night difference.
Every year Apple delivers a major iOS release that makes it "feel" like a new phone (I won't even debate that the improvements are now incremental), but the product marketing is most pleasing!
When you buy an Android product, you just feel used and abused. New cool Android version came out? Fuck you, buy a new phone.
A new Samsung flagship gives you 4 years of new Android versions and an extra year of security updates. A Google Pixel is 3 major updates + 2 of security updates.
Long term support is still not as good as iPhones, but it's no longer the old (to quote the comment above) "Fuck you, buy a new phone", not to mention that on Android some of the new iOS features are actually delivered as normal app updates (gallery app, maps, the equivalent to webkit, etc) or backported via Google services to 4-5+ year old Android versions (eg: file sharing, earthquake warnings, covid tracking support, etc).
Her go-to brand was OnePlus, but OnePlus has been slacking the last couple of iterations. Other brands with high end phones were almost as expensive as the iPhone (Samsung) or targeting performance users.
She also got a lot of discounts on her iPhone 14 and managed to get it for under $600 - nearly the same price as a new OnePlus flagship.
The downside is that increasing number of services assume that you have a smart phone. Some of the restaurants no longer have physical menus, for example.
I have been back and forth between iPhone and Android. My last iPhone miraculously died out of nowhere, breaking so badly that even recovery mode was in a boot loop, and the software was even more depressing.
At this point, I'll just be the fucking weird guy with a Linux UMPC.
In other words, I'm happy to take your recommendations for dumb phones. :)
Last time I walked into my telcom store and asked for a dumb phone, they had exactly one model available, and that's the one I got.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/JHXCgaqPSXARvGbw6
It's an Alcatel 4051S, and runs some variant of Android.
I'd be more interested in the numbers for Europe or other locations where Android & WhatsApp have the majority share. Are they consolidating or switching?
I came at it as a value consumer, and I still contend that used SE iPhones are the best value across the board. But also, I don't really use apps (or my phone in general) much, so OS support and responsiveness are my only two real concerns. YMMV.
Cheap androids are still buggy and terrible and even in 2023 lack basic features like NFC.
The terrible state of support and updates in the Android world means there is next to no used value for Android flagships. iPhones command stupid prices, but at least they retain their value.
I had a Pixel 3A that did not age well and went back to iPhone.