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Comment by puranjay | Hacker News Reader

It's because of the cost, nothing else. Everyone I know would switch to iPhone in a heartbeat if they had the Rs. 60k you need in India to buy one. My Android phone, on the other hand, cost me Rs. 13k.

Android thrived because shelling out a month's salary on phones is a losing proposition in third world countries (which have the majority of phone uses)

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This is just not true. Android manufacturers sell huge numbers of high end phones that cost the same amount as iPhones. I have owned both, and found the Android to be a much better user experience. iPhone has the worst keyboard I've ever used, the screen on the 5 was way too small, and I just find the whole UI to be really clunky and badly designed for the way I use devices (eg. The lack of a back button and inconsistent way apps try to deal with this limitation)

Sure, plenty of people like iPhones and plenty of people would swap, but I know a lot of people who really don't like iOS and are far happier with a high end android

> This is just not true. Android manufacturers sell huge numbers of high end phones that cost the same amount as iPhones.

But not in India, a third world country, as OP makes the point. Majority of Android budget range here is ₹5000 ($90) to ₹15000 (~$300). Where as an iPhone costs ₹53,500.

My point is that there are probably plenty of Indians who, if they had 53,000 to spend on a phone, would choose a high end Android. Some iPhone fans try to make the argument that "everyone who could afford it would buy an iPhone", and that is just not true as evidenced by the large number of high end Androids which are sold. Some people just don't like iOS.

Apple's profits from the iPhone alone in the last quarter exceeded the total profits of Google and Microsoft combined.

This is both true and completely irrelevant.

How so? This is about Google's relative competitiveness. You seem to blithely dismiss Apple's success with iOS relative to Android, claiming that high end Android phones sell in comparable quantities. This is patently contradicted by the facts. If the goal of an enterprise is to make profits, Apple is crushing Google in the mobile device business.

The discussion is not about whether Apple is a profitable company, its about whether "everyone who could afford it would buy an iPhone". There is plenty of evidence that many people prefer Android regardless of price. Whether Apple's business model is good or bad is a completely different discussion.

Google & Apple aren't remotely in the same business WRT mobile. Apple is hugely successful, no question, with their success riding largely on four factors: 1) industrial design, 2) idiot-proof OS, 3) zero hardware diversity, 4) 3rd party developer support. Google is hugely successful, too, but they have no mission statement that says they are intending to squeeze every last penny from the mobile market. I mean seriously, the last number I heard was that there were close to 1500 people working on Chrome-related stuff. The fact is that Google makes "small" (hundreds of millions to a few billion) amounts on a broad variety of things, and underwrites the spectrum of R&D/engineering via their advertising juggernaut. Whether they do well at this or not is another question, but they are not competing with Apple on hardly any fronts.

At first i thought, you were comparing against only the mobile divisions of Google and Microsoft. But after some search, I found that their profit is really massive!

Now i really want to understand the forces in play, that help the iphone reap such gigantic profits :)

Price is just as important in the first world countries. Not everyone wants to spend almost $1k USD on a phone, which is something you might drop and break. When there are Android phones on offer with equal or better specifications and a lower price, most people will pick that one.

It's not because of the cost. I switched to Android because I wanted a large phone and the Galaxy Note was available YEARS before the iPhone 6.

Then there is the annoying fact that as soon as a new iPhone comes out, the old ones get slow/ start crashing Every single iPhone my family has had (sample size of fifteen, starting from the original phone) has had this issue.

Edit: the other big issue was the iPhone's lack of multitasking. For the longest time it wasn't possible to do something as trivial playing Pandora while reading HN.

Well, in the US, a bit over a year ago I chose the Galaxy Note 3 over the iPhone 5S because it was bigger, faster, higher-resolution, had much more RAM, had a much larger battery (which was replaceable), etc. The iPhone 6 didn't exist at the time and I stand by my choice to go with an Android phone given the options at the time.

I don't think so. Having an iPhone is considered a status symbol. If they started selling it for say Rs.20K, it will lose its allure.

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