Absent first mover advantage with the iPhone, it's extremely difficult to see Apple ending up where it is, with a closed ecosystem.
Though I'd agree with provisioning+codesigning can be a mess with iOS.
Just compare how android and iOS handle backgrounding.
Thank you very much for correcting me!
A new entrant would be unable to secure the investment, because even if he would produce the exact same piece of hardware with the same quality, the carrier distribution channels, the brand-image and (walled garden) ecosystem of Apple will prevent users to even notice and adopt the product, and the press would jump onto it and rip it to pieces.
So how would this normally work?
--> You disrupt the market by doing something particularly good, while being average in other areas, succeed, then iterate.
But this doesn't work in the Smartphone space as:
1.) iOS users are unlikely to leave their ecosystem because they can't take _anything_ with them
2.) the Google ecosystem leaves little room to disrupt and secure return-of-investment, and
3.) for Android you need to (re)build your own ecosystem to _match_ Google/Apple from the start.
That's why it's not a competitive market anymore, and needs to be (wait for it:) regulated to restore an even competition field for Hardware, Applications and Services.
But yeah...not a popular opinion here, I know...
Also no iTunes, Apple Music, Apple Messages, Apple Pay, Apple Fitness, any kind of native Mac integration (Safari Bookmark sharing, Shared Bluetooth devices, clipboard sharing, Continuity Camera, AirPlay,...)?
No Apple Wireless charger, Apple Watch, Airpods, Apple-specific Accessories, Apple App-based carkeys or Apple CarPlay?
That's quite rare.
- nearly all apps support Android as well. The ones I used (navionics, banking apps, WhatsApp) you just log in on Android, no cost involved. - most Apple first party apps have a Google equivalent (google wallet, google keep notes, google messaging etc.) that is very similar - my AirPods work equally well with android
Google's been ahead of Apple on tons of core user-facing features since the start (widgets, backgrounds, folders). The two platforms have extremely slowly converged to near-total feature parity. The only "advantage" of Apple's total ecosystem lock-in is relative seamlessness due to the vertical integration between their various services.
The thing is, it's barely any harder to set up an equivalent Google/Android ecosystem and has been for well over a decade as well. The real issue on the Google side of things is the renaming/shifting of services. Messages -> Gmail Chat -> Talk -> Duo -> Messages, Google Play Music -> Youtube Music, etc.
The feature parity's been there
Users do not want to browse the web on mobile for all their activities, when Apps are generally faster, more secure, and has all their prefs recorded EVEN if a webapp is functionally equivalent (and most are only 70-90% equivalent)
So the new entrant has to curry favor with all these large software vendors (some of whom are now competitors) and offer something for some key uses of a smartphone.
And as someone who’s done native for both, Android’s native SDK is a mess that even Android devs actually hate it.
Meanwhile, iOS’ SDK is incredibly exhaustive and coherent. I don’t know what your basis is for “better designed software”, but being able to fork a desktop OS from 20 years prior, make it into a mobile OS, then to a tablet OS, then to a watch and a headset OS, and then have billions of users on it all and make a trillion-dollar company out of it⸺does that not sound like good engineering to you? All while the competition can hardly build anything that actually lasts.
Microsoft and Google basically did the same thing, and in neither case it's really a testament to how "good" their respective software is engineered. If the amount of driver cruft on MacOS is anything to go by, the engineering underneath iOS and WatchOS is probably a fucking nightmare in most respects.
I used to be "the Android guy" at a big games publisher. In my time the billing component had to be rewritten three times solely because of Google changes. The Apple one was written once and left alone.
We can't even discuss why those Google changes happened because doing so would get you shot, or worse.
The tech direction that was going on at Apple was enormously better than other companies. It does feel like they've gone off the rails a bit, but things like Swift are underappreciated entirely because they're so successful, just with the wrong sort of developer.
It just means that it will take a while, like Intel, or what is happening with search and Google.
They got where they did by leapfrogging the competition, dominating the supply chain, having incredible customer trust/service (with a sprinkle of Jobs' magic), thus reframing the entire category of smartphone.
It's unclear if anyone has delivered all these together. Google has dominated all other players at the OS level.
gosh, if they hadn't basically created the market for phones like this it's hard to see how they would be dominating the market for phones like this, given their behavior.
because that's what first mover advantage is in this case. They created a market, in hardware - that's pretty difficult.
regarding other posts saying Apple wasn't first mover in smartphones:
Hey, I remember what those old things looked like. There was such a qualitative difference between the iPhone and its competitors at the time that it seemed like a whole new category of product.
There were plenty of mobile phones out there before that could download and run apps, and Apple didn't even have their famous app store at the beginning of the iPhone, either.
Which is to say, not one that locked away features and functionality (ringtones! games!) to create additional revenue channels for carriers.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but per memory Jobs used iPhone exclusivity to crack carrier "Our pipes" models open.
I had unlimited data on non-carrier controlled phones pre-iPhone on AT&T, and it was far cheaper than the iPhone data plan. Dumbphone plans had cheap data add-ons in comparison, just take the SIM from the ultra-cheap phone they included in the plan and drop it in whatever unlocked GSM phone you wanted. It supported 3G before the iPhone even launched. You just had to get a 3G-enabled cheap dumbphone with your plan to ensure you got a 3G-activated SIM.
Obviously, they didn't market this so most consumers didn't know this was an option.
I seem to dimly remember that they had some early lead on multitouch. But that one specific nifty technology is a far cry from a general 'first mover advantage' in phones with apps.
That meant the iPhone had a full fledged browser that you could actually use. The browsers on PalmOS and Windows Mobile were jokes compared to Safari and most devices didn't have WiFi so we're always stuck on relatively slow cellular. A lot of smartphone plans also didn't include unlimited data. The BlackBerry plans were equally terrible, tied to BBM accounts, and the browsers were even worse.
The iPhone also had a real e-Mail client that could connect directly to a POP/IMAP server. A lot of competing smartphones only supported e-Mail through gateways run by the carriers or an enterprise connection. Even lacking features early on like BCC early iOS Mail was a lot better than the competition for normal users.
I think these all come down to Apple approaching the iPhone from asking what normal people might want to do with their phones instead of what "corporate" wanted people to do with their smartphones. This was 180° from the design approach of RIM, Microsoft, Palm, and even Nokia.
For instance decent enough to take a picture of an A4 page and be able to read it afterwards.
And IMAP support.
And Opera mini was a good enough browser, though mostly for text, as indeed 3G cellular (which the first iPhone didn't have) then cost 1000€/Go (funnily enough, that felt cheap and fast at the time, because it indeed was compared to what came before).
(Also video calls, though those are still niche for phones.)
And I hear Nokias were themselves quite primitive compared to what Japan had ?
Again, everything in your comment this seems like Apple made an arguably better offering in an existing market. That's not a first mover advantage.
If anything you can say, Apple was late to the party and learned from the mistakes of others?
I never claimed Apple had a first mover advantage. They made a smartphone much more aligned to consumer desires than any of the competition. Palm, Microsoft, RIM, and Nokia all approached smartphones from the angle of business/enterprise users.
You can call Apple's approach being late to the party but that presumes that them entering some market is a forgone conclusion. Apple has rarely if ever been truly first to market with a product.
The other big thing is more subtle: the iPhone was the first major break in the carriers’ value-extraction model. It was common that you’d get phones with half the storage used by promo apps the carrier wouldn’t let you uninstall, and the carrier app stores were both limited and unbelievably expensive. We had multiple clients who were interested in mobile apps but the cost of being in the stores was like $50k per carrier plus half of the proceeds, and that was an improvement over the time Qualcomm demanded to see the balance sheet so they could decide what percentage of their TOTAL revenue was fair – we asked and they confirmed that they expected a cut of every sale, even ones which never involved the mobile app. The energy at WWDC08 was incredible because the app stores were both terms were so much better than anyone had gotten before, and you only had to do it once. I still think it should be better now but it used to be so much worse.
The thing that really made iPhone different was capacitive touchscreen, and the OS designed around that. WinMo pretty much required the stylus for many things.
But the iPhone did _not_ have any first mover advantage. If anything, Apple was late to the party.
> [...] when most devices had tiny screens and half their physical size was a keyboard.
Ie Apple introduced a new, arguably better, entrant into an existing market, and managed to grow that market.
But I can see your argument that you can re-interpret being that first to really commit to a big touch-screen only and (almost) no buttons to be a 'first move'. (Though a different comment mentioned that Apple wasn't the first here either?)
The iPhone was definitely a successful device!