Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

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The reason the windows comparison fails is the strength of the developer platforms and markets. Windows 'won' because it had the lions share of the apps. Platforms exist to run apps. What's happening with phones isn't directly comparable though because phones primarily exist for calls, messaging, browsing and apps. Apps are only one facet of their functionality, but its the one where Apple is still very dominant. If you stop looking at the smartphone market as a phone market, and focus just of the smartphone (browser and app) functional usage Apple is so dominant it's not funny. It is still comfortably ahead in overall developer revenue, web usage share and premium app availability. So as a smartphone app platform, iOS is the Windows here. Even if Android overtakes iOS as an app platform, which is conceivable and may even be inevitable, the health of the iOS platform is strong enough it's hard to see how it could become so marginalised as to threaten its viability for a very long time to come. Certainly it's not facing the existential threat MacOS did in the 90s.

I think you got it backwards. Windows only obtained the lion's share of apps because Microsoft had the right hardware strategy.

When Apple released their graphical OS, Windows had zero market share. Windows wasn't even a product, but even when it was - people didn't buy it to run DOS apps, they bought it to run Windows apps. It was cheaper and it worked well enough.

That's why Android is comparable to Windows here. It was released later than iOS which already had market share, any hardware vendor can integrate with it, like Windows...and it's more developer friendly, like Windows (compared to the Mac OS). It's also better than good enough, like Windows. And those will be the direct reasons that will eventually let Android overtake iOS as an application platform.

Those are all good points, so +1, I think the situations then and now are just too different to directly compare. In some ways iOS compares best to Windows in the 90s, in others it compares best to MacOS.

What made Windows viable was Microsoft's heavy investment in providing first class Apps with the Office suite. Arguably Google did this with email and maps apps for Android, but even feature phones have those. They're not a platform differentiator. With iOS you had Garageband, Pages, Numbers and even some first class thirdarty apps out within days of the launch of the App Store. Even now iOS has far more high quality apps and games than Android. If you were to look at comparative app availability and quality between iOS and Android now, and compare that to similar comparative metrics for Windows and Mac OS at similar stages in the 90s, iOS would look a lot more like Windows that it would look like MacOS, whatever you think about 'developer friendliness'. Android being more 'open' may make it more like windows in some ways, but so far that has still yet to translate into it moving ahead as an app platform, and even if/when it does that will no more spell doom for iOS than iOSs current success there spells doom for Android now.

You're right that apps are a definite factor in the success of a platform. I think we can both be right here, so +1 yourself buddy :) Without any good apps, I think a more open hardware strategy is worthless - but a more open hardware strategy can translate to lower prices which make up for poor application performance, bugs, etc.

In any case, I hope that everyone can get what they want. For me personally that means: Give me absolute control over what is running on the device.

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