Given Android has 71% of the worldwide market share it’s difficult to make the argument Apple holds a monopoly on the smartphone market [1]. Even in the US, until about 2020, Android had a higher subscriber base, and there is no reason the situation could not reverse and iOS drop below its July 2023 53% subscriber market share [2].
Moreover, give iPhones are significantly more expensive than comparable Android phones, Apple’s ability to claw market share back from Android phones over the last decade is the opposite of how a monopolist might operate by flooding a market with cheap alternatives. It speaks to a consumer perception that iPhones have a larger value.
As a tagalong to my comment, I really wish Android phone makers would get their act together and give Apple better competition. If the trends of the last ten years hold up, iPhones might actually become a monopoly product at some point. ;)
Please explain how android isn't competitive with apple.
My experience switching from iPhone to Android is I lost pretty much nothing and gained a lot, particularly by going to a folding phone (which Apple obviously doesn't offer yet). Android is much easier to work with in most ways - iOS is so set in its ways it can be very difficult to do basic things like transfer files from the phone to a computer.
Apple's processors may be faster, but this is becoming an increasingly less useful distinction on phones. The only thing on phones that continues to require increasingly faster processors is stuff like games, and fair enough, but I honestly just don't play them on my phone personally.
I am very happy with my 5 year old Xiaomi Android phone.
Not sure what kind of competition is needed to browse the internet, watch YouTube, listen music and occasionally shoot few pics.
On top of that, I have been locked out of my apple account for 2 months when my iPad with the authenticator suddenly died, good thing I had a desktop to use as I could not login in my MBP.
Apple just kept sending me emails of them contacting me in two weeks to reset my password and kept not doing it.
And I won't even mention their "privacy" charade. If you forget your MBP password you can reset it in recovery mode and thus access any MBP.
Sure, all your apps get logged off, but you can still open any file.
I hate their products and wish I didn't have to deal with them, but I have to test apps and websites on their hardware.
> I really wish Android phone makers would get their act together and give Apple better competition
Google and Samsung tried and failed. Google with their flagship Pixel line, which just doesn't sell well, so they moved downmarket. Samsung with their Galaxy line, but they're always playing catchup/copycat to Apple.
The sad fact is that 1) Google sucks at hardware, 2) Samsung sucks at taste.
Apple really has a magical combination of (arguably) good taste, and operating chops to deliver the hardware at scale.
LG had great hardware and great taste. Unfortunately, consumers weren't interested, outside of a small minority who liked some of the somewhat geeky features that LG pioneered (like always-on screen display) or added (like fancy audio DACs).
Agreed that Samsung is just playing copycat to Apple. They used to make great, innovative phones without being a copycat, like back in the S4/S5 days, but then they just decided to copy everything Apple did, like eliminating the headphone jack.
I think that’s part of the problem - android doesn’t work as a product model, for literally anyone involved.
Google would not be doing it if it wasn’t for the advertising business. It’s pretty much the definition of a loss-leader to get people into the ecosystem for things that google can monetize. So android as a product is implicitly, foreverially tiedup with marketing and spyware, because google isn’t onboard otherwise. Same as gmail or search was a loss-leader to get people onboard for advertising too. Google only cares about these things insofar as they might stop being a funnel into their money-makers.
SOC vendors can’t make a run providing 7 years of driver/firmware support for a product they sell once at bleedingly thin margins. Or at least, they really don’t wanna.
OEMs can’t make a run providing 7 years of support for someone else’s software, especially when they also have to do a lot of the driver work themselves thanks to IHVs abdicating their job.
Consumers get stuck with a product that loses support in 2 years or whatever, and may even have landmines involved with unlocking it to continue support (Sony wipes the camera firmware if you unlock the bootloader for example). They face a completely unnecessary hardware and software treadmill due to all these other factors. Supporting your own phone is not a reasonable expectations for Joe Sixpack either.
The idea is supposed to be the “linux model” but honestly linux has the same problems, it is reliant on the same unpaid labor around driver work to make up for the inability of vendors to track the ecosystem and provide the long-tail of support. In cases where the vendor can’t open source it, the functionality simply ends up broken, and driver support, kernel versioning, and DKMS is a constant battle for end users. Just like with custom roms for android.
Android simply has too little margin split among too many disinterested parties to ever really work. And fixing it would involve either increasing the size of the pie (margin), which consumers in this segment hate to an unfathomable degree (android users = cheapskates is a reliable first-order approximation, borne out by the app store revenue too).
But that's the free-market system working as intended, right? Literally every penny has been squeezed out of margins, software costs pushed onto free labor in the open-source community, and ad revenue used to contra-fund and push end-user prices even lower. Android is the finest solution the free-market can deliver, that's how the system is supposed to work, and it’s delivered an excellent product for the needs of the customer - it's just you're not the customer, you're the product.
The alternative is vertical consolidation and bringing more things under the same roof, raising the price, and targeting the consumer needs instead of the ad revenue needs. Basically the apple model. But that can never be a viable path in a GPL world. And it will still probably involve paying more - phone costs are currently subsidized by all these indirect costs like ad money and vendors cutting corners on support. There is more work that will need to be done, and that contra-revenue from advertising revenue needs to be backed out of the purchase price, so at the end of the day consumers will simply have to pay somewhat more (hopefully not apple prices of course). But again, people are cheapskates, android users doubly so.
I don't know why people got so allergic to the idea of paying for their operating system, the baseline assumption now seems to be that it needs to be free, and if that's the case you will never be free, only stuck in a choice between advertising-mongers and exploiting unpaid labor. And that can either be in hardware costs, or in actual recurring support costs, but either way, someone needs to be paid to sit down and make sure the bluetooth and sound drivers work.
You see the same problem in software too - open-source projects get commercial entities tapping their value without providing contributions back, or existing via patronage to the needs and goals of the commercial entity. Without an incentive by the actual developers to provide end-user value, and with permissive licensing, you end up with a constant struggle for financial homeostasis. Firefox/Mozilla, for example.
People complain about android but they still are not willing to pay a little more to opt-out of these problems. The revealed preference is for purchase price above all else, and people still think in the yardstick of Apple being "too expensive" rather than Android being "too cheap". The yardstick is still the artificially-cheap advertising-subsidized Android product.
These are fundamentally problems of not enough margins to support all the players in this ecosystem, which leads to them looking for places to find the revenue to make it work. Pay a little more and these problems go away.
If you want to stop being the product, get used to opening up your wallet. That transactionality is a good thing - you can’t really demand boundaries when you’re living on someone else’s dime. It’s Google’s house and they’re letting you crash for free. But this is the very deepest core of the problem - people will do anything except just pay a little more.
You will never stop being the product if you can’t bring yourself to be a customer.
I mostly agree with your take. Mobile is particularly challenging. I'm optimistic about a hardware only startup succeeding (Framework but for phones), but building your own hardware and your own OS is much harder, I think.
For an even spicier take: GPL has accelerated/worsened this trend, imo. Not out of anything they really did wrong, but actually just by well-intentioned success.
It’s about “code revenue” vs “services revenue”. If I can’t sell you a copy of Office 97, well, obviously that pushes things to the Office 365 model. And the unfortunate reality is that a huge amount of important code is now GPL, which means a huge amount of the world’s codebase is now un-monetizable in that sense. This has fueled a massive push for “alternative revenue”, and the whole google model has been that the "alternative source" is advertising dollars.
Moreover, GPL itself has conditioned people that the right price for software is “free”. And obviously software is not free to produce, nor is the ecosystem of phones conductive to the Linux “hardware bazaar” model in the same way as 1990s era IBM-compatible PCs. [0]
Well, if the only valid price for consumer-facing software is “free”, and a huge amount of the software in the world is now un-monetizeable in the sense of being able to sell a copy of the software to fund your R&D effort… obviously that just pours gas on the fire of the tivo’ization and SaaS revenue models. That is a correct business-development response to the changing market conditions.
GPL has essentially forced the collapse of the traditional “fee for source” or “fee for binary” model. I think it probably would have been out-competed by service revenue eventually anyway, given that consumers obviously prefer “free” to paying money, but basically this is an accelerationism thing whereby GPL has more or less collapsed the entire proprietary-software market (to the extent that many people now view hardware that doesn’t have open drives as being somehow fundamentally bad or illegitimate), driving everyone into the arms of the SaaS providers. It has accelerationism’d us right into tivo’ization.
Big “my neighbor’s cats keep getting eaten by coyotes and he says that he just goes to the shelter and gets another cat and I said it sounds like he’s just feeding shelter cats to coyotes and his daughter started crying” energy. Like GPL literally has been so successful that people think proprietary software is illegitimate… except for the “free” ones backed by advertising dollars.
GPL has been feeding consumers to the coyotes. It doesn't mean they meant to do it, but, functionally by killing fee-for-software models and by conditioning everyone that the only valid price is "free", that's what it's kinda done. Proprietary software still exists... you just don't pay with money anymore.
I am of course human too, I groan at the thought of paying $350/year for a personal jetbrains license or paying $1000 more for an apple laptop than a comparable commodity one... but software costs money to develop and you make your choices about what is worthwhile and which relationships you want to accept enshittification on. My point is just that transactionality (ie, you pay money and receive a service) is actually a good thing, because those services are much less likely to enshittify if it's going to come at the expense of actual paying customers rather than just some livestock waiting to be sheared. It changes the nature of the relationship.
It doesn't mean there aren't bad companies that do enshittification anyway, but if the expectation is pay money => receive good, then obviously you can reasonably hold expectations about the nature of what you're going to receive, vs GPL and proprietary models fostering the "it's free, why are you complaining" mindset. GPL and SaaS models are alike in that respect and GPL has both directly reinforced that mindset, and also pushed far more companies to SaaS far more quickly with its own success.
[0] (Wireless+modems have specific regulatory requirements that are inherently incompatible with open-licensing, it is illegal to release a wireless chipset which is capable of violating local band-regulation requirements, which functionally imposes the requirement that devices listen to the local band to detect weather radar upon bootup to see if they're allowed to use the band in a given locality. This is part of why modern routers are so slow to boot up! And to prevent tampering/replacement, this effectively must be put in a closed blob to pass certification. Which is why projects like OpenWRT are struggling with Wifi 6E/6GHz and other newer hardware - when I checked maybe a year ago, there were zero 6E devices supported. And unfortunately, it is not possible to make a very good phone without wireless connectivity. It literally is one of the most challenging domains to try and go open-license on because the FCC ain't playin'.)
Outlawing this "contra-revenue"/ad-supported moel is low-key one of the biggest things the EU could tackle though. Big problem, wide problem.
Granted they're walking down that path with GDPR dismantling a lot of the worst of the surveillance capitalism, and with forcing Android to have actual reasonable OS support lifespans... they are gradually forcing these externalities/defects to be priced in properly. But I think it is explicitly worth stating as an end-goal: transactionality and fee-for-service or fee-for-product is a good thing, because then companies are competing to service customers and not competing for more livestock to be the product.
If you want to stop enshittification, get rid of contra-revenue models. The thing you are paying for, should be profitable to produce at the price you sell it. If you have engineering effort that's shared with other products: fine, amortize/attribute it however makes sense. But if you are selling a widget that costs $10 to produce for $9, on the expectation of $3 of revenue: no, that should be illegal.
If nothing else it's a competition issue, you can't have "honest" firms ever break this situation if you have other companies "dumping" and selling below-actual-cost. It is really no different from any other kind of dumping.
Otherwise, the advertising-supported companies will always be able to out-compete the "honest" companies, so it will always be a race to the bottom.
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anyway, as far as hardware startups specifically: those exist and they just haven't gotten any traction. Fairphone, pinephone, lightphone, etc. These inevitably end up getting very little traction among enthusiasts etc. I don't think the existence of these solves any real problem with the android ecosystem.
Also, ecosystem is a major factor in OS adoption. Like you could go run MenuetOS right now, so why don't you? Ecosystem and network effect and available codebase etc. So these hardware startups have to work within the existing OS ecosystems etc - almost all of these startups are android and the ones that aren't, frankly are doomed. Consumers don't want featurephone or phone-specific app stores in 2024, especially for some niche product with no actual apps released for it. There is very little point to making a custom OS from vxworks or whatever, that's not where the problem lays here.
Similarly: Framework and System76 are attempting to thread that needle of supported hardware+OS configurations on "generic linux". This exists, just not to massive success or fanfare or changes in how the world works. And they're not re-engineering the OS. Even System76/PopOS is based on ubuntu iirc. Jumping to MenuetOS or other completely-new-OS things is a whole other can of worms.
Despite Framework/System76 existing, the world still runs on Windows 11 ad-supported installs or free Linux labor. So I don't know why it would be different for phone hardware+android.
Overall great comment, I wanted to highlight the part about "dumping". A huge amount of dumping-equivalent behaviour guess on in the software industry, I sometimes wonder what kind of market we'd see if it were prevented.
It's one of the biggest problems with "sustainable software" if you will. How is honest software supposed to outcompete "free", especially for key "platform" things like email, where "getting platformed" (in the sense your mail delivers) is non-trivial?
things like that really need to cost money, because they cost money to deliver. and "I get it with my ISP" isn't a satisfying answer either.
SMS 2FA is another similar problem. It's basically an identifier token at this point and you have very little choice over it etc. I actually have been denied for credit cards twice (I think, microcenter told me why it usually fails for them and it makes sense) because my phone number is in my parents' name... (I pay them for a line on a family plan as an additional line). It's obviously not the same problem but it's getting at the problem of these "bundled" services having become de-facto identity providers.
Cause it's not adobe making photoshop free, right? It's bundled search, mail, identity provider, as a free service (you don't pay with money).
But there are many many smaller places it happens etc. I don't quite know how to draw the line of "this is a feature that's bundled" vs "this is actually a separate service" but like, in the large picture there are places where it's not really questionable, right?
"Free as in freedom" is obviously on the clear side of the line. I don't quite know how to draw it for everything, because again, you can see ways where "free MS windows" could be exploitative even if it were free. I guess that falls into the "actual damages" sort of regulatory scenario.
I haven't exhaustively developed the concept but yeah, I mean, "dumping" seems obviously problematic in a market-fairness sense.
> iPhones are significantly more expensive than comparable Android phones
This misperception is key to understanding the market, which is really two markets: Android has cheaper phones and dominates there but in the mid to high-end market the situation is reversed because the equivalent Android devices aren’t cheaper and because Qualcomm/Samsung lagged so far behind on CPU performance you’re getting something which performs like 1-2 iPhone generations back in most apps.
Breaking out of that dynamic is hard because the Android manufacturers have to share more of their hardware revenue with less service revenue to compensate, so they don’t really have much room to lower prices since they’re already underperforming at the same price points.
What could change a lot would be regulators forcing App Store competition or limiting revenue sharing across units. Apple and Google both benefit from that at the expense of the pure hardware vendors, but I’m not sure how effective e.g. the EU App Store regulations will prove in practice.
It sounds to me like you’re saying that Apple management recognized that an integrated ecosystem (phone, tablet, watch, desktop OS etc…) could offer significant value to its costumers (in Apple’s case, the customer is the end user) while providing sufficient margin to serve as a profitable business model. Google, an advertising company, was focused on giving away free stuff (Gmail, Android, etc…) as an means to build profiles of its users that it could sell to its customers (in this case, advertisers).
A bit off topic, but I personally find Google, and by extension, the Android ecosystem, to be an underhanded business model. I don’t feel bad it’s ending poorly for them. It’s especially rich Google ripped off Apple in order to get Android launched [1].
I don't know how you can call Android, a Free and Open Source OS, "underhanded" in comparison to it's competition. For Christ's sake; Apple is currently fighting the EU over whether or not they have the right to charge developers for using hyperlinks.
You claim, without evidence, that open source software determines the ethics of business models built upon it. This is false. Much of the foundational software of the internet is open source, but internet businesses and organizations run the gamut from philanthropies to crime syndicates.
Conversely, many proprietary business models are carefully hidden from view to prevent people from understanding the extent of the harms. When a software product is made Open Source it fundamentally proves that there is nothing to hide. We can both agree that Google's business model is acerbic, but they aren't putting themselves between the user and the OS like Apple does.
Even if you're the most anti-Google person in the world, you have to admit it's a bit ironic that Android can be built with all Google services disabled whereas iOS, due to it's wonderfully-designed Google Search integration, cannot.
This is such a ridiculous take and a ridiculous cited source.
Apple makes 25% of its profit from laundered ad money. Like you need to stop trying to understand a sophisticated duopoly ecosystem from a fanboy blog.
