On Thursday, 9 November 2017 at 14:42:41 UTC, Joakim wrote:
There is some truth to this, but if you cannot compete with a
free product- cough, cough, Windows Mobile- I don't know what
to tell you. In other words, google cannot afford to spend a
fraction of the money on Android that Apple spends on iOS,
because google makes so little money off of Android by
comparison, so there are disadvantages to their free model too.
It is one of the reasons why they have now plunged into the
high-end smartphone market with their recent Pixel line.
I think the lack of a viable business model for Android
vendors, other than Samsung, is a huge problem for the
platform, as Apple hoovers up two-thirds of the profit with
only a tenth of the phones sold:
https://www.counterpointresearch.com/80-of-global-handset-profits-comes-from-premium-segment/
As I said earlier, the mobile OS story is not over yet, there
are more changes to come.
People that buy Android I find tend to keep their phones for
longer. People with Apple phones keep buying new ones. Part of
that is how many phone Apple claims are on the latest version. So
developers only target the latest one, then their apps don't run
on old phone and it encourages people to "upgrade". Android apps
tend to support more versions as well, it's a more diverse OS.
I've even seen websites that just straight up drop support for
old versions of Safari. Can't get the latest version of Safari
cause you can't update your phone. Then you go to firefox just to
find out you can't install it cause it's no longer support for
that iOS version. Can't even download an old version of firefox
that did support it cause it's Apple's store and they don't
support that.
