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Soleron on 06 May 2012
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SamuelRSmith said:
Soleron said:

...


I (partially) disagree. The main reason behind people buying iPhones (and smart phones, in general) is for the extensibility of the feature set through apps, with a clean central interface to get between them. Until Sony (and others) realise(s) this, and that it's not all about being able to do everything out of the box, they will continue a downwards path.

The problem is that it may already be too late... why would anybody who has already spent a lot of money on the Apple ecosystem give up all their apps just to rebuy them on another platform? And why would anybody going in pick up something other than iOS/Android when there is already such a huge userbase and app catalogue on those platforms?

Sony, in order to turn things around, would need to create something that will literally blow the minds of customers, as well as provide a great ecosystem across multiple platforms, and literally pay software developers to port all of the top apps over to the platform. On top of this, they need to make sure that whatever they do cannot be mimicked by Apple within the 18-24 months after they hit the market.

In other words... they can't do it. 

It is power users that are customising. People are buying apps, but they're not relying on them and they're only doing free or $1 apps which they aren't too attached to (I believe they are gimmicks). The vast majority of the time a normal user spends on their phone is still: phoning, texting, browsing, e-mail, taking or viewing photos/video, playing music, all with the built in applications to do so.

The might have 3 or 4 small games they care about and would really want to re-play, but Sony just needs to make sure most of the popular apps have ports. I don't believe their software not transferring is holding people back, I'm seeing a lot of iOS <-> Android switches depending on what's out. Or Sony should just use Android and edit it to be smoother or faster or easier to use.

The way I can tell people are not attached to apps is that the revenue of desktop software companies, and console game publishers, still vastly exceeds mobile revenue. If that ever changes then people will be more attached but I think it's just people buying a clock edit to the radio application, or a star map they use for half an hour because it's shiny.

Anything you need to download an app for and then rely on, is a failure by Apple/Google. Those things should be part of the base feature set.

I agree Sony needs to be better to persuade people to switch, but there is a lot of obvious room for improvement in Android's interface and base capabilities to work with.