Hacker News Reader

Comment by fenaer | Hacker News Reader

What if a significant number of the people who adopted Android as their first smartphone move on to something else as they become power users? In Apple’s last two earnings calls, Timothy D. Cook, the chief executive, reported “a higher rate of switchers than we’ve experienced in previous iPhone cycles.”

Are they trying to insinuate that power users move to iOS? I'd consider myself a power user, but for that very reason I've stuck with Android. Higher-end Android phones provide much more for me than iOS can with its closed-ecosystem.

Also, are these "switchers" coming from Android, or a mix of other sources?

View on HN

If I had to bet, it's probably Apple finally getting around to offering a phone product in the size that people want. For years, if you wanted a large phone your choice was only Android.

And now the situation is reversed, if you want a normal size (ie, less than 6 inches) phone, Apple is starting to be the only company in business that delivers powerful hardware in a non-phablet form-factor

I assume you're comparing only Nexus devices, because the breadth of Android devices in different sizes is by no means limited.

Yeah, I've got a Moto X and while it's not particularly small, it's basically the non-phablet version of the Nexus 6 with a few minor differences.

The trouble being that small devices are practically always very slow and forgotten the day they hit the market.

It depends on what they mean by power user. If you like customizing the OS, running another ROM, launcher, or theme, than Android is friendly to that.

If you like using more powerful software, than iOS / iPad seem the clear winner there. Look at the top 10 in both stores, they are very different.

In Apple Store, you will see lots of photography and music apps. In Android, its games and social media.

I've been developing for Android half a decade now, but still see the OS as a toy that can't grow up - mostly because of its design and APIs, but thats another story for another time.

I think both Microsoft and Apple are in better situation with convergence between their form factors and the capabilities of each platform.

For audio there's the known latency problem, but photography(the more popular category), android recently released new camera API's . won't they solve that issue?

Yeah, the imaging software can be really good on Android as well. Still, even as a fairly devoted Android user and not a big iOS fan, I'll point out that only the best Android devices have camera hardware comparable to the newer iPhones. The flipside to being able to install Android on any hardware means that the OS can only do so much if OEMs cheap out on the camera hardware.

Still, for the average user, the cameras on just about any higher end Android phone or iPhone will be perfectly fine for their intended purpose: being the camera you have at hand. For a photography pro or enthusiast, even the newest mobile devices (from any OEM) will only win on convenience versus a dedicated camera with larger optics. There's still only so much you can do with a lens that's a little chip of glass and a tiny sensor.

I consider myself as a power user aswell, but I've left Android after 5 years on the platform - reason being Lollipop. I'd consider Android when Google starts taking it seriously again and not a pet project.

They may be talking about power users as users who uses more of the phone, not necessarily technically inclined users.

Are they trying to insinuate that power users move to iOS?

Well, if Google tries to make Android more profitable by adding more restrictions and trying to make it more like an iPhone-- I'll be faced with the decision to either switch to iPhone (which is probably better at being an iPhone than Android) or one of the Android forks. As the article points out:

Even in the rest of Asia, where many low-cost phone manufacturers do include Google’s apps on their phones, there’s growing interest in finding some alternative to Google’s version of Android. About 30 percent of Android smartphones shipped in the last quarter of 2014 were actually modified, or forked, versions of the OS that may not be very hospitable to Google’s services, according to the firm ABI Research.

I don't understand why they don't use Tizen, FirefoxOS, Sailfish, Ubuntu, etc if they dislike google so much. The reality is they need google for all the services they can't or won't implement. They don't want to build their own mapping software, browser, etc.

Its all moot anyhow. Google has shoved all the newest APIs into its google play services and without a google license for those items, those apps won't run. This was a play to stop fragmentation like the one you're predicting.

I suspect the 30% of phones are Xiaomi phones, which solely exist because the CCP won't let Chinese citizens access google mobile services as they're blocked by their national firewall. If this block didn't exist, Xiaomi would be using all the Google services everyone else does.

I believe Xiaomi phones use Google apps in non-Chinese markets, e.g. India.

> This was a play to stop fragmentation like the one you're predicting.

The parent seemed incredulous that "power users" would use iOS. My point was that power users might just give up being power users if Google does things like you describe: locking up the APIs in google play, etc. A lot of so-called "power users" will just go ahead and give up on Android and use iOS devices.

I had to switch based on my company only supporting ios on a BYOD plan. But once I switched I sorta prefer ios. But I could be swayed back, especially if Android phones start decreasing in price as they commoditize themselves like PCs did.

This assumes "power users" want more engagement with their phone.

If I want to do something complex, I'll do it on my laptop or desktop. My phone is always with me and I just want something straight forward for everyday life.

I've always interpreted "power user" in this sense to be someone who occasionally wants to do something specific with their device that may require specific tools.

Like a "normal" user (of a phone) will make calls, texts, browse the web, check email, maybe watch a movie or play a game. A power user may just be someone who wants a custom keyboard for some reason or even just wants to be able to download a file via the browser, navigate to it in the file system, maybe unzip it, copy it elsewhere, open it with another app, etc.

Granted these are just my personal examples because they were things I found exceedingly difficult to do on my old iPad (although I guess the keyboard thing has been added). It wasn't something I had to do all the time but something as simple as browsing the folder structure and finding/moving the file I just downloaded was gonna require me to jailbreak the thing. On my Android phones and tablet, it's not something I often need to do but when I do, it's just a matter of using a file browser.

I think "power user" implies using more basic/powerful features outside of launching apps from a set of icons. Then again, some of the awesome projects I've seen controlled via an iPad prove that iOS users can also be power users as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com