Charles Arthur, from his blog:
High-end Android OEMs had a terrible second quarter. The smartphone business generally grew less quickly than for a couple of years as China stagnated overall. But not for Apple; by contrast, it grew strongly. Samsung’s Galaxy S6 did not impress the punters. LG’s G4 sold less well than apparently the company hoped. Sony had a torrid time. HTC then redefined torrid. Premium Android has a real, immediate problem.
This is all followed up by detailed analysis/numbers. Bottom line, the Android OEM business is in the toilet. [H/T John Kordyback]
I wonder if Google saying “no more bloatware” and solidifying what buttons (home/back) can be on the device – even in specific left/right locations, would help? Part of my issue with Android is, I feel I need to root my phone on day 1, to replace the crap that comes on it. It’s like buying a PC – there’s pre-installed junk that I don’t want, nor will I ever use.
Even PCs aren’t as bad. I don’t recall ever having to “root” a PC in order to get rid of preinstalled junkware.
“Open”
Well, no real surprise, and exactly what the more intelligent observers expected. The only Android OEM making money was Samsung, and that was almost purely due to Apple not delivering devices with bigger screens and, in earlier years, carrier support. Now that Apple has addressed both (and Samsung was clever enough to eliminate most differentiation by removing stuff like accessible batteries and card slots while increasing prices)… We see what people really want.
… and I have not seen many articles lecturing Apple to license iOS in order to win in quite some time.
It might, but then it’s damn near impossible for even the fairly techie customers to see why to buy a flagship vs a lowest-common-denominator phone. (No, 300 ppi vs 260 or 200:1 contrast vs 76:1 ain’t gonna do it.)
The fact that YOU don’t like the crapware is relevant, but so is the fact that Samsung offers proprietary replacements for approximately every Google app, advertises the same, and is the only successful company in the Android camp. They’re reasonably close to being able to outright refuse—take their entire product line to a Tizen/Cryanogen/AOSP setup if Google were to foist any such program on its OEMs.
This is exactly what happened to all the iPod cloners eventually. You see the exact same thing playing out with iPhone cloners, but the user base is so much larger that it takes much longer to play out. The problem for the cloners is that people typically buy only one clone before they get a real iPhone (or iPod in the past.) The reason is the user carries around their clone and they see their friends doing 10x as many things with the real device, and at some point, one of those things is something they really, really like, such as FaceTime, and they switch. Also, the iPhone clone gets the user into “the iPhone lifestyle” and when it comes time to buy a second clone, the user recognizes that an iPhone is more valuable, based on using it day-in-day-out for 2 or 3 years, and they can justify the expense.
So what really happened in 2007 is Apple murdered the entire phone industry. Samsung just wholesale cloned iPhones and found a way to hang on a little longer.
You have to wipe the entire Windows PC to get rid of the preinstalled adware. That is much, much more significant than rooting. You essentially build a new PC while using your brand new PC as a parts PC.
The day the iPhone went on sale, Apple had one carrier in one country, but Samsung had thousands of carriers in over 100 countries. That was Samsung’s only advantage over Apple, but it is gone today.
https://goo.gl/rVmGS4&jnivj