It's Official: Apple Is Just A Niche Player In Smartphones Now - Android dominates

[rocketpig]

CChaos said:

It's uncanny...

Think back to the mid-80s for a moment. This is history repeating itself.

Macintosh in those days had an OS that they more or less locked down and only allowed specific individuals to really make stuff for it if they got a hold of a license. It's not the same these days, as you can program for it at people's leisure, but back then it was NOT easy to make programs for Macs. With iOS, every program needs to be accepted to their standards and must go through their screening process.

Meanwhile, you have Android. They are the IBM and onward PCs that were more or less open source and you could do whatever the hell you want with. People program for it, go the route they want and nothing really stops it. No screening process that needs to be gone through. In turn, Android is growing at an alarming rate and is absolutely owning the market share. Macs today still barely manage 10% market share in the desktop and laptop computer market. iPhones are doing slightly better, but not by very much.

People draw the analogy to the 80s but it's a flawed one for a few reasons.

1. Consumers are driving the phone market. Unlike the 80s PC revolution, businesses are not driving the mobile phone market. That means Apple's closed system will not be nearly the burden it was during the early PC days. The average consumer doesn't need the flexibility found in enterprise, which was one of Apple's downfalls in the 80s.

2. Apple is more profitable today and developers are reaping the benefits of it Thanks to Apple's ecosystem, the average iPhone consumer spends more money on apps than his Android brethren. That negates much of Android's advantage in pure numbers and instills confidence in developers that if they make a quality app and sell it for $5 in the App Store, it WILL sell copies.

3. Unlike Windows, Android is not a traditional competitor to iOS. Google makes no money from Android itself and comparitively speaking, not much from the Play Store. They're pushing services. As a result, they don't care about manufacturers skinning their devices, changing UIs, adding bloatware, or refusing to install Google services at all. This has led to an increasingly fragmented eco-system, with hardware capabilities, UIs, operating systems, etc. scattered all over the place. It will take a few years to sort out whether this is going to do long-term damage to Android or whether Google will be able to push through it into an arena where fragmentation is no longer an issue.

Time will tell how this plays out but anything more than a cursory glance shows that it is VERY different from the PC war of the mid 80s and early 90s.