How Android gets to 100% market share

http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/01/how-android-gets-to-100-market-share/

by colincarter41 • 10 years ago

44 74 10 years ago

marvel_boy• 10 years ago

"Anecdotally, one of the most frequently cited reasons among iPhone users for staying with iOS is that they love the “blue bubbles.”

No way. I don't use iMessage (instead I use Whatsup) but I dont consider Android. I have a Motorola G3 also (work) but the Os is confusing, slow and crash frequently.

Oletros2• 10 years ago

The OS slow and crash frequently?

vetinari• 10 years ago

Didn't you know? Windows on circa 2009 Atom netbook is also slow and crashes frequently, therefore Windows is a bad, slow, crashy OS.

(Tongue in cheek, obviously).

IkmoIkmo3• 10 years ago

Yeah, cmon...

Text messages sent per day peaked in 2011 and have declined ever since, we're now half a decade later.

In fact just last month we heard FB and Whatsapp process 60 billion daily messages and growing, SMS 20 billion and dropping. Further, a decent chunk of those SMS messages are from feature phones, i.e. on an iPhone the SMS to IM ratio is more significant than 1:3 and again, growing.

Early on, especially for families, iMessage was somewhat of a big deal. But today and into the future? My whole family is on Whatsapp, from age 10 to age 70 and we all have each others' numbers. We exchange text, videos, voice recording, pictures, there's absolutely zero draw from iMessage. I use SMS exclusively for things like 2FA.

blackoil• 10 years ago

Most SMS, I receive right now are promotional messages or transactional messages from bank, airlines etc. Friend and Family have stopped sending SMS for a while now.

josephmx• 10 years ago

That's a big flaw with Android, people make unfair comparisons because the average Android phone is cheap. Using your example:

Motorola G3 (July 2015, £150 currently on Amazon)

iPhone 6s (September 2015, £497 currently on Amazon)

Obviously a device costing more than 3X as much is going to perform better, eg my S6 (£355, also 2015) almost never crashes and is fast.

Shivetya• 10 years ago

I am not sure which phone my father has, but based on searches for trying to solve a simple issue on his it seems like something many Android users have.

I cannot delete his email account off the phone. There is no method short of pointing it to a bad email address and provider that I can find and I am not sure it would even allow that change. Really, there is no option anywhere to delete. I did get it to stop pulling email down automatically and when opened.

As in, give a consistent and easy to use presentation. Each phone company seems able to totally muck it up but they all have odd issues in common

vezycash• 10 years ago

If the email you're trying to remove is the email used to register the phone, it can only be removed by resetting the phone. The same thing applies to Windows phone.

IkmoIkmo3• 10 years ago

That's not standard though, I don't even have email setup on my S7 on the standard email app, although I've got my phone registered... although I did get the Gmail app and set up mail later, and I can indeed delete it.

almostdvs• 10 years ago

I ran into this the other day. Under accounts, you tap the account you want to delete. There should be the option to remove account in the menu button ... It just says sync now. Tap the account again. That took a few hours to figure out.

charlesdenault• 10 years ago

I believe the fragmentation issue is going to take a lot longer to solve than the author leads on. Android is rooted in its open nature, and it's what caused the proliferation of the OS in the first place. It's going to take much longer for OEMs to stop shipping bloatware on the devices, or Google will effectively fork the OS simply because the OEMs can't keep up. Look how long it's taken Microsoft to get their OEMs to comply (but I do believe Google is a different beast in this regard).

viraptor5• 10 years ago

Depends on the contract really... do we know what terms do the OEMs sign? If Google is free to change the terms on renewal, then they can simply state "must provide updates for X years, up to Y days after upstream, cannot change Z - or you can't call it Android". That would either cause an instant solution or instant full-OEM-forks.

pjmlp7• 10 years ago

Fragmentation is an old beast.

Android is no better than what we had with Symbian, J2ME or proprietary mobile OSes that came before current crop of mobile OSes.

As long as OEM and networks have the last word on firmware, it will always exist´, in name of product differentiation.

viraptor5• 10 years ago

It's way better than J2ME and lightyears ahead of proprietary OSes. If you think that's not the case, I don't think you remember those times very well. With J2ME it was basically close to impossible to create any app apart from the most basic ones without producer-specific APIs. Nokia, Siemens, Samsung, Motorola, etc. - they all had their own special extensions. Even if some game was released for more than one handset, each make had its own version.

(Although it was possible to write a translation layer - I wrote a nokia-to-siemens translating classes which worked in most cases)

Now you may have issues with versions of Android and which features you can support. You may also have issues with different resolutions. But it's nowhere as bad as in 2002.

philliphaydon2• 10 years ago

I moved from android to iphone to Windows phone to android to iphone.

I'm sticking with iphone. Android has been the worst experience for me. Had an old HTC with 2.# and a Samsung note4, plagued with issues.

The thing that annoyed me most (besides Samsung bugs like not being able to remove keyboard notification) is when you register with an email, you cannot use the same email for another service.

My contacts exist on my windows live account which happens to be my gmail addy, when I register the phone with gmail I cannot sign in with windows live using the same email because the email already exists. A bug that doesn't happen on Windows phone or iphone.

Coupled with slow buggy laggy android phones, and malware. I ditched iphone. Android with so much market share is not a good thing either. Just a IE scenario all over again.

viraptor5• 10 years ago

I'm having trouble understanding your issue with email addresses. What do you mean by "another service"? What do you mean by "register the phone with gmail"? What do you mean by "sign in with windows live"?

IkmoIkmo3• 10 years ago

I've got no clue, I use the same email account for gmail, microsoft, samsung, facebook etc. I have lots of services with the same email setup.

philliphaydon2• 10 years ago

My gmail is registered as a Windows Live account.

So same email / different password / different service.

I store all my contacts on my Windows Live account.

-----

When you register the phone with a Google Account it automatically creates an Account for the email associated to the Google Account.

I then want to add a Windows Live account in order to sync my contacts.

Android OS prevents this by disallowing the registration of the Windows Live service by telling me that the email address is already associated with an account.

pjmlp7• 10 years ago

I will never get an iPhone as it is a luxury on my part of the planet or when I eventually do get one, it will most likely be second hand.

The Windows Phone developer stack is great in regards to Android, but with all the missteps Microsoft did, the last being the failure to fulfill the promise of upgrading all WP 8.1 devices to WP 10, we really only have Android as viable alternative to iOS.

goodcanadian• 10 years ago

I haven't read the article, and I love my Android phone, but I sincerely hope Android never approaches 100%. Monoculture is never a good thing.

amelius• 10 years ago

True, except that as a developer I'd prefer to target only one architecture. Now we're forced to write apps for iOS and Android and the web separately.

dkopi2• 10 years ago

Interestingly, you consider "the web" a single target, and not "Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, Opera, IE" on "Linux, Windows, MacOS, IOS, Android"

And we consider android a single target, and not "Samsung, HTC, Motorola, Sony..."

We don't need android hegemony for easier development. We need cross platform development tools.

hellofunk• 10 years ago

I don't think that will ever change but toolkits that let you target more than one platform will continue to improve (like Qt).

spriggan3• 10 years ago

True, except that as a developer I'd prefer to target only one architecture. Now we're forced to write apps for iOS and Android and the web separately.

How is it a bad thing ? more work == more money for you as a developer.

coldcode• 10 years ago

Nuclear bomb on Apple campus? This isn't 1995 and Windows. If anything Android becomes even more fragmented both for commercial reasons and by government meddling requiring different things in different countries until the OS is split up. Saying you are "Android" requires Google's restrictive license and that grates on lots of manufacturers who would love to be out from under their thumb and control their business. Don't forget that Apple still makes almost 90% of the profit from building devices. That is Android's weakness. Even Google doesn't directly make much. You may love your phone but if building it doesn't make the suppliers money something has to give.

Zigurd2• 10 years ago

As an OEM you have basically two choices:

1. Do Android. You can crap it up with bloatware, or you can resign yourself to non-differentiation in software features and try to distinguish your products in hardware.

2. You can dick around with a badly supported oddball OSs and go back to Android after you waste some money. Nobody is putting in the effort it takes to compete with Android.

Maybe someone should put in the investment to compete with Android, but it isn't true that "something has to give." It is possible to compete with Android, but that will cost many tens of millions, and maybe hundreds of millions just to try. Samsung won't put that kind of money into Tizen. Who else has the potential to compete?

Really, the OEMs have nobody but themselves to blame for poor margins. If they can't think beyond bloatware "differentiation" they deserve their outcomes.

Buetol• 10 years ago

They fly over the biggest details of all: The price.

For 100$ you can get the Moto E 2nd gen and I consider it a very high-end phone (nice screen, fast, latest version of android).

mcphage• 10 years ago

The author mentions that—and that the fact that carrier contracts are dying means that US consumers will become more price conscious. However, Apple's high margins mean that iPhones are more expensive because Apple wants them to be (and people will pay it). I don't expect iPhone prices to ever be as low as Android prices, but if Apple needs to, they can drop their prices and still make money on their phones. They just don't want to (because they like making money), and it's yet not clear that they have to.

msh• 10 years ago

But a very crappy camera.

forgettableuser3• 10 years ago

This author has a pretty cynical view that the only reason people use iPhone is because of vendor lock-in, like from iMessage.

This disregards the fact that many iPhone customers are still first time buyers with no lock in hanging over their head. And also Apple has an extremely high customer satisfaction rate keeping customers coming back. Customers buy iPhones because they like the experience and ecosystem, not solely due to some service lock-in.

JoeAltmaier• 10 years ago

I don't think there are any more first-time buyers of phones left in the world. Really. Its not a thing any more. Also no first-time shoe buyers, or food buyers. Except maybe the very young trickling into the market.

PKop• 10 years ago

First time iPhone buyers, coming from Android, for example.

forgettableuser3• 10 years ago

I meant first time Apple buyers which includes both people who've never had phones and people who've switched. Apple's first time customer base is still significant.

chimeracoder• 10 years ago

I don't think there are any more first-time buyers of phones left in the world

I might believe you if you said the US, but given how low iPhone penetration is outside the US, combined with how many new people use the Internet for the first time each day in India alone (100,000,000 per year, most of that being accessed over a mobile device), it's clear that smartphones haven't hit 100% potential market penetration the way "food" has.

SeanDav2• 10 years ago

First time buyers generally base their choices on the opinions and views of more experienced people, often within their circle of friends, family and acquaintances. It is quite conceivable that a first time buyer is making their choice because of the vendor lock-in of their peers.

forgettableuser3• 10 years ago

That's called a recommendation, not a lock-in.

The author also argued that Apple's lock-in like iMessage isn't really working. Thus, this is how Android gets to 100%.

hammock• 10 years ago

I never thought of iMessage as vendor lock-in before, but the blue vs green texts is the #1 reason I hear from my peers why they disparage Android users

ocdtrekkie2• 10 years ago

For a while there was actually an issue with iMessage where even after you switched to an Android, iMessage would continue to direct your friends' iPhones to contact you via iMessage instead of SMS. So if you left the iPhone platform, all of your iPhone-owning friends would be unable to text you.

Google Hangouts seemed to be a step in this direction as well, with SMS integration, it pushes users to use their proprietary protocol instead where possible. But it looks like Google has backed off of it since then.

patwolf• 10 years ago

My grandfather was a Ford man. He would only ever buy a Ford, even during periods when other manufacturers were making vastly superior vehicles.

I used to think such loyalty was a silly generational thing. My generation was a fickle consumer. We would research and decide on a purchase based purely on merit. That's how I was with phones. When iPhone was the most compelling phone, I would buy an iPhone. When there was a more compelling Android phone, I would buy that.

However, as I get older I'm starting to understand loyalty, and it's not what I expected. It isn't a dogmatic belief in a brand. It's recognizing that sometimes it's easier to stick with what works and not worry about whether there's something better out there.

Now that we've been living with smartphones for a while, and they mostly just work, I don't expect people find as much value in switching between Android and iOS. As long as both exist, neither will ever reach 100% market share.

vlan0• 10 years ago

I find a lot of those brand loyalist tend to be foolish in many ways. They make decisions based on emotion, rather than analytical thought.

I worked in retail for a good part of a decade, and I was dumbfounded by the number of people who would never buy another product from X manufacture based on a single poor experience with one product. It's simply an emotional response to their unpleasant experience which results in the person making a decision without statistical data to validate their idea. Which seems like nothing more than just plain ignorance.

mathgeek• 10 years ago

Keep in mind that many people spend a lot of analytical time on other aspects of their adult life: work, vacations, insurance, children (including paying for college), home maintenance, etc. Sometimes smartphone and entertainment fall into the group of things just not worth spending your limited thinking time on.

Touche• 10 years ago

Or making the statistically correct purchasing decision is not the most important thing in their life.

allengeorge• 10 years ago

Maybe it's because they value their time/money more than giving the manufacturer another chance? It's a hassle to have to deal with a defective product. If you're lucky, you catch the defect early and can return it (though shipping is a hassle). If you're unlucky, you'll do the repair-dance: all the shipping hassles plus not having the use of the product for however long it takes to be fixed.

Yeah. Life is too short to deal with those kinds of problems.

JohnTHaller2• 10 years ago

You mean someone who spends days sleeping on the sidewalk in a tent to buy the new version of a pocket computer isn't buying based on analytical thought?

The thing is, I can understand staying up late and going to a midnight release of something like folks have done for a new Harry Potter book or a new Halo release. Following that up with staying up late reading the stories of the characters you already know to find out what happens next after waiting for a year. Or buying Halo with a buddy to head home and play the story in co-op for a few hours to have fun and see what the next chapter of the story is. With each of those emotion comes into play but for a reason and a purpose. But, in each case, you're satisfying a curiosity of what happens to a story/characters and you're spending no more than maybe 20 minutes of your time. Plus, you get to incorporate it into a fun evening with friends (having dinner and playing games for a couple hours before heading to the store to grab the game and coming back and playing for a couple hours). But, camping out for days to buy a new version of a pocket computer designed for consumption of content just seems silly.

r00fus• 10 years ago

While I find those who hop from one product to another are often doing analysis without enough data. They're the ones who are making rash decisions, and if not, then they should be able to show me their data.

"You don't know what you have until it's gone" is relevant here - those who don't switch may value what exists (and the perceived/tangible benefits of the vendor/platform they're using) well over any new snazzy features/improvements.

How many new "problems" or "missed expectations" will happen when I migrate that I didn't factor into the switch? About half my office switched to Android in 2012, then switched back in 2014 with the new iPhones.

About the only "leap of faith" that worked for me was moving to T-Mobile in 2013 - very very few problems with them, and the removal of bill anxiety is a blessing I cherish every month (I still have a monthly reminder telling me to check my ATT/VZ quotas - I haven't deleted those - they're my reminder of how shitty it was with them).

serge2k• 10 years ago

I have a Sharp TV. I noticed a while after I bought it (still fairly new, <1 year) that the left half of the screen is dimmer than the right. This is not a big enough problem that I will deal with Sharp about the warranty (I tried, they wanted me to jump through hoops so I said screw it). You can be sure I'm not going to buy another product from them. It's a minor QA issue, I don't mind it about 95% of the time, but when Samsung or LG make basically the same thing for a similar (lower?) price then why would I bother with Sharp again.

In the case of Apple vs. Android. I've used both, developed for both. Owned an Android phone for a long time, have no intention of ever going back. iOS is just that much better for me.

Exception being if Apple decides to be a bunch of fucking assholes and drop the 3.5mm jack.

agumonkey• 10 years ago

It's a form a wisdom. At first you try to maximize every variables, later on you realize that meh, that part (car, phone, foo) is alright as it is, let's do something else. Instead of amplifying the market turmoils, you try to act as a capacitor, smoothing out the noise.

lj3• 10 years ago

I agree there will always be Android and iOS, but for different reasons. Brand loyalty taps into the same part of the brain that team loyalty does. Being a die hard Apple fan is the same as being a die hard Red Socks fan, as far as our brain is concerned. So to create that brand loyalty, there has to be two separate teams to compete against, a rivalry. Mac vs Windows. Android vs iOS. Mets vs Phillies.

Having two separate and competing ecosystems actually makes Apple more money than if they had a monopoly. You're not just buying a mobile phone, you're on our team now. You're one of us. And we all have Apple laptops too.

Zigurd2• 10 years ago

It's not like "Ford or Chevy?"

It's more like "Toyota or Mercedes-Benz?"

Even that doesn't quite capture it. Apple will defend a position at the high end of the market, even though they might give some ground in profit margins. They will do that by controlling the hardware and software, by vertical integration in CPU design, and by getting the best, newest technologies in the supply chain by locking up exclusivity. Samsung will try to chip away at this at the high end, but Samsung doesn't get how Apple attracts and keeps customers.

On the other hand, both the current dominance and the future potential for Android is understated by the article. Android is already above 75% share in handsets alone. Android N previews desktop features like resizeable windows. Android will be the basis of the vast majority of embedded screen-based UIs. Google's IoT OS is essentially a headless Android. And if Google can get tablets right, Android will become the dominant desktop productivity OS, too. Android will be in a class by itself, the way Windows used to for about 25 years, and the dominance will probably be as long-lasting.

raddad• 10 years ago

I ran into a rural agricultural phenomena in which people wanted the biggest, baddest, newest, fastest, whizzbang available. One was particularly upset when I informed him the place he purchased said biggest, baddest, newest, fastest, whizzbang was a discount store and thus didn't have the biggest, baddest, newest, fastest, whizzbang; all they had was older tech.

I think I ruined his life.

Amir6• 10 years ago

If something works and as long as it is not such a crucial part of your life and its a matter of life and death, you can (in many cases) always go with what has worked previously. One other argument can be the cost benefit analysis of the research itself. The time and energy (which ultimately translates to money in some sense) you put on research may not be worth the feature(s) one option offers over the other. You may never use that feature or in case of price, how much you may have to more for the brand you are loyal to may be less expensive than the risk you take by going with an option which you yourself have not tested first hand.

hathym• 10 years ago

I have an iPhone and will keep it forever just to make sure Android will never make it to 100% market share ( evil smiley )

ocdtrekkie2• 10 years ago

This post seems to ignore some huge points. Google can only solve fragmentation by closing the platform, and ending it's primary incentive to manufacturers. Meanwhile, the agreement it would need to use to do that, is already such an overreach, that it's being gone after for antitrust in several countries. In order to reach this Google fanboy's utopia, the agreement would need to get much more illegal than it is now.

pducks32• 10 years ago

Haha yea I know a lot of people who hate green bubbles.

supercoder• 10 years ago

How TechCrunch gets to 100% clickbait.

How Android gets to 100% market share

Related Stories