Android Users Aren’t Cheap (but cheap users use Android)

blog.stewtopia.com

7 points·scottporad··4 comments

As I see it, Android is the low-cost, mass-market provider. To me, it's perfectly analogous to desktops: Microsoft was the low-cost mass-market provider and Apple was the high-end, premium provider. With mobile, Android has simply replaced Microsoft.

Actually the analogy is a bit off. Most people aren't buying Android phones they are buying Samsung phones.

With the PC market Microsoft tightly controlled the Windows experience so it looked and worked the same regardless of the hardware. With the Android platform this isn't the case. HTC phones looks and behave quite differently from a Samsung or a stock Android. Each company is trying to differentiate the experience as much as possible.

And the low-end/high-end split isn't playing out the same this time around. Samsung is very much in the high end and Apple is tipped to be releasing a low-cost iPhone shortly. And if Apple manages to gain low end traction like they did with the iPod then that could change the game a bit as well.

This is spot on. Really important to recognize that a large swath of the population still makes phone calls, cares about voice communication and doesn't care about data as much. This probably also speaks to the rising popularity of some of the voice and video apps - a segment of the app universe that might be able to pull these customers into the data world over time.

+1 for Scott, Agreed, Android replaced MS.

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