10 ms·

How Android gets to 100% market share

44 points by colincarter41 10y ago

marvel_boy 10y ago
"Anecdotally, one of the most frequently cited reasons among iPhone users for staying with iOS is that they love the “blue bubbles.” No way. I don't use iMessage (instead I use Whatsup) but I dont consider Android. I have a Motorola G3 also (work) but the Os is confusing, slow and crash frequently.
- Oletros 10y ago
  The OS slow and crash frequently?
  - vetinari 10y ago
    Didn't you know? Windows on circa 2009 Atom netbook is also slow and crashes frequently, therefore Windows is a bad, slow, crashy OS. (Tongue in cheek, obviously).
    - pawadu 10y ago
      incidentally, I know a best selling author who wrote his two first books on a 2009 atom netbook. (conclusion: stop blaming the tools and get back to work)
- IkmoIkmo 10y ago
  Yeah, cmon... Text messages sent per day peaked in 2011 and have declined ever since, we're now half a decade later. In fact just last month we heard FB and Whatsapp process 60 billion daily messages and growing, SMS 20 billion and dropping. Further, a decent chunk of those SMS messages are from feature phones, i.e. on an iPhone the SMS to IM ratio is more significant than 1:3 and again, growing. Early on, especially for families, iMessage was somewhat of a big deal. But today and into the future? My whole family is on Whatsapp, from age 10 to age 70 and we all have each others' numbers. We exchange text, videos, voice recording, pictures, there's absolutely zero draw from iMessage. I use SMS exclusively for things like 2FA.
  - blackoil 10y ago
    Most SMS, I receive right now are promotional messages or transactional messages from bank, airlines etc. Friend and Family have stopped sending SMS for a while now.
- josephmx 10y ago
  That's a big flaw with Android, people make unfair comparisons because the average Android phone is cheap. Using your example: Motorola G3 (July 2015, £150 currently on Amazon) iPhone 6s (September 2015, £497 currently on Amazon) Obviously a device costing more than 3X as much is going to perform better, eg my S6 (£355, also 2015) almost never crashes and is fast.
Shivetya 10y ago
I am not sure which phone my father has, but based on searches for trying to solve a simple issue on his it seems like something many Android users have. I cannot delete his email account off the phone. There is no method short of pointing it to a bad email address and provider that I can find and I am not sure it would even allow that change. Really, there is no option anywhere to delete. I did get it to stop pulling email down automatically and when opened. As in, give a consistent and easy to use presentation. Each phone company seems able to totally muck it up but they all have odd issues in common
- vezycash 10y ago
  If the email you're trying to remove is the email used to register the phone, it can only be removed by resetting the phone. The same thing applies to Windows phone.
  - IkmoIkmo 10y ago
    That's not standard though, I don't even have email setup on my S7 on the standard email app, although I've got my phone registered... although I did get the Gmail app and set up mail later, and I can indeed delete it.
- almostdvs 10y ago
  I ran into this the other day. Under accounts, you tap the account you want to delete. There should be the option to remove account in the menu button ... It just says sync now. Tap the account again. That took a few hours to figure out.
charlesdenault 10y ago
I believe the fragmentation issue is going to take a lot longer to solve than the author leads on. Android is rooted in its open nature, and it's what caused the proliferation of the OS in the first place. It's going to take much longer for OEMs to stop shipping bloatware on the devices, or Google will effectively fork the OS simply because the OEMs can't keep up. Look how long it's taken Microsoft to get their OEMs to comply (but I do believe Google is a different beast in this regard).
- viraptor 10y ago
  Depends on the contract really... do we know what terms do the OEMs sign? If Google is free to change the terms on renewal, then they can simply state "must provide updates for X years, up to Y days after upstream, cannot change Z - or you can't call it Android". That would either cause an instant solution or instant full-OEM-forks.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Fragmentation is an old beast. Android is no better than what we had with Symbian, J2ME or proprietary mobile OSes that came before current crop of mobile OSes. As long as OEM and networks have the last word on firmware, it will always exist´, in name of product differentiation.
  - viraptor 10y ago
    It's way better than J2ME and lightyears ahead of proprietary OSes. If you think that's not the case, I don't think you remember those times very well. With J2ME it was basically close to impossible to create any app apart from the most basic ones without producer-specific APIs. Nokia, Siemens, Samsung, Motorola, etc. - they all had their own special extensions. Even if some game was released for more than one handset, each make had its own version. (Although it was possible to write a translation layer - I wrote a nokia-to-siemens translating classes which worked in most cases) Now you may have issues with versions of Android and which features you can support. You may also have issues with different resolutions. But it's nowhere as bad as in 2002.
philliphaydon 10y ago
I moved from android to iphone to Windows phone to android to iphone. I'm sticking with iphone. Android has been the worst experience for me. Had an old HTC with 2.# and a Samsung note4, plagued with issues. The thing that annoyed me most (besides Samsung bugs like not being able to remove keyboard notification) is when you register with an email, you cannot use the same email for another service. My contacts exist on my windows live account which happens to be my gmail addy, when I register the phone with gmail I cannot sign in with windows live using the same email because the email already exists. A bug that doesn't happen on Windows phone or iphone. Coupled with slow buggy laggy android phones, and malware. I ditched iphone. Android with so much market share is not a good thing either. Just a IE scenario all over again.
- viraptor 10y ago
  I'm having trouble understanding your issue with email addresses. What do you mean by "another service"? What do you mean by "register the phone with gmail"? What do you mean by "sign in with windows live"?
  - IkmoIkmo 10y ago
    I've got no clue, I use the same email account for gmail, microsoft, samsung, facebook etc. I have lots of services with the same email setup.
  - philliphaydon 10y ago
    My gmail is registered as a Windows Live account. So same email / different password / different service. I store all my contacts on my Windows Live account. ----- When you register the phone with a Google Account it automatically creates an Account for the email associated to the Google Account. I then want to add a Windows Live account in order to sync my contacts. Android OS prevents this by disallowing the registration of the Windows Live service by telling me that the email address is already associated with an account.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  I will never get an iPhone as it is a luxury on my part of the planet or when I eventually do get one, it will most likely be second hand. The Windows Phone developer stack is great in regards to Android, but with all the missteps Microsoft did, the last being the failure to fulfill the promise of upgrading all WP 8.1 devices to WP 10, we really only have Android as viable alternative to iOS.
goodcanadian 10y ago
I haven't read the article, and I love my Android phone, but I sincerely hope Android never approaches 100%. Monoculture is never a good thing.
- amelius 10y ago
  True, except that as a developer I'd prefer to target only one architecture. Now we're forced to write apps for iOS and Android and the web separately.
  - dkopi 10y ago
    Interestingly, you consider "the web" a single target, and not "Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, Opera, IE" on "Linux, Windows, MacOS, IOS, Android" And we consider android a single target, and not "Samsung, HTC, Motorola, Sony..." We don't need android hegemony for easier development. We need cross platform development tools.
  - hellofunk 10y ago
    I don't think that will ever change but toolkits that let you target more than one platform will continue to improve (like Qt).
  - spriggan3 10y ago
    > True, except that as a developer I'd prefer to target only one architecture. Now we're forced to write apps for iOS and Android and the web separately. How is it a bad thing ? more work == more money for you as a developer.
    - adrianN 10y ago
      Some people like to do interesting work instead of doing basically the same thing over and over again.
    - dkopi 10y ago
      More work == more developers needed to get the same job done == less productivity == lower wages.
coldcode 10y ago
Nuclear bomb on Apple campus? This isn't 1995 and Windows. If anything Android becomes even more fragmented both for commercial reasons and by government meddling requiring different things in different countries until the OS is split up. Saying you are "Android" requires Google's restrictive license and that grates on lots of manufacturers who would love to be out from under their thumb and control their business. Don't forget that Apple still makes almost 90% of the profit from building devices. That is Android's weakness. Even Google doesn't directly make much. You may love your phone but if building it doesn't make the suppliers money something has to give.
- Zigurd 10y ago
  As an OEM you have basically two choices: 1. Do Android. You can crap it up with bloatware, or you can resign yourself to non-differentiation in software features and try to distinguish your products in hardware. 2. You can dick around with a badly supported oddball OSs and go back to Android after you waste some money. Nobody is putting in the effort it takes to compete with Android. Maybe someone should put in the investment to compete with Android, but it isn't true that "something has to give." It is possible to compete with Android, but that will cost many tens of millions, and maybe hundreds of millions just to try. Samsung won't put that kind of money into Tizen. Who else has the potential to compete? Really, the OEMs have nobody but themselves to blame for poor margins. If they can't think beyond bloatware "differentiation" they deserve their outcomes.
Buetol 10y ago
They fly over the biggest details of all: The price. For 100$ you can get the Moto E 2nd gen and I consider it a very high-end phone (nice screen, fast, latest version of android).
- mcphage 10y ago
  The author mentions that—and that the fact that carrier contracts are dying means that US consumers will become more price conscious. However, Apple's high margins mean that iPhones are more expensive because Apple wants them to be (and people will pay it). I don't expect iPhone prices to ever be as low as Android prices, but if Apple needs to, they can drop their prices and still make money on their phones. They just don't want to (because they like making money), and it's yet not clear that they have to.
- msh 10y ago
  But a very crappy camera.
forgettableuser 10y ago
This author has a pretty cynical view that the only reason people use iPhone is because of vendor lock-in, like from iMessage. This disregards the fact that many iPhone customers are still first time buyers with no lock in hanging over their head. And also Apple has an extremely high customer satisfaction rate keeping customers coming back. Customers buy iPhones because they like the experience and ecosystem, not solely due to some service lock-in.
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  I don't think there are any more first-time buyers of phones left in the world. Really. Its not a thing any more. Also no first-time shoe buyers, or food buyers. Except maybe the very young trickling into the market.
  - PKop 10y ago
    First time iPhone buyers, coming from Android, for example.
  - forgettableuser 10y ago
    I meant first time Apple buyers which includes both people who've never had phones and people who've switched. Apple's first time customer base is still significant.
  - chimeracoder 10y ago
    > I don't think there are any more first-time buyers of phones left in the world I might believe you if you said the US, but given how low iPhone penetration is outside the US, combined with how many new people use the Internet for the first time each day in India alone (100,000,000 per year, most of that being accessed over a mobile device), it's clear that smartphones haven't hit 100% potential market penetration the way "food" has.
- SeanDav 10y ago
  First time buyers generally base their choices on the opinions and views of more experienced people, often within their circle of friends, family and acquaintances. It is quite conceivable that a first time buyer is making their choice because of the vendor lock-in of their peers.
patwolf 10y ago
My grandfather was a Ford man. He would only ever buy a Ford, even during periods when other manufacturers were making vastly superior vehicles. I used to think such loyalty was a silly generational thing. My generation was a fickle consumer. We would research and decide on a purchase based purely on merit. That's how I was with phones. When iPhone was the most compelling phone, I would buy an iPhone. When there was a more compelling Android phone, I would buy that. However, as I get older I'm starting to understand loyalty, and it's not what I expected. It isn't a dogmatic belief in a brand. It's recognizing that sometimes it's easier to stick with what works and not worry about whether there's something better out there. Now that we've been living with smartphones for a while, and they mostly just work, I don't expect people find as much value in switching between Android and iOS. As long as both exist, neither will ever reach 100% market share.
- vlan0 10y ago
  I find a lot of those brand loyalist tend to be foolish in many ways. They make decisions based on emotion, rather than analytical thought. I worked in retail for a good part of a decade, and I was dumbfounded by the number of people who would never buy another product from X manufacture based on a single poor experience with one product. It's simply an emotional response to their unpleasant experience which results in the person making a decision without statistical data to validate their idea. Which seems like nothing more than just plain ignorance.
  - mathgeek 10y ago
    Keep in mind that many people spend a lot of analytical time on other aspects of their adult life: work, vacations, insurance, children (including paying for college), home maintenance, etc. Sometimes smartphone and entertainment fall into the group of things just not worth spending your limited thinking time on.
  - Touche 10y ago
    Or making the statistically correct purchasing decision is not the most important thing in their life.
  - 10y ago
Amir6 10y ago
If something works and as long as it is not such a crucial part of your life and its a matter of life and death, you can (in many cases) always go with what has worked previously. One other argument can be the cost benefit analysis of the research itself. The time and energy (which ultimately translates to money in some sense) you put on research may not be worth the feature(s) one option offers over the other. You may never use that feature or in case of price, how much you may have to more for the brand you are loyal to may be less expensive than the risk you take by going with an option which you yourself have not tested first hand.
hathym 10y ago
I have an iPhone and will keep it forever just to make sure Android will never make it to 100% market share ( evil smiley )
ocdtrekkie 10y ago
This post seems to ignore some huge points. Google can only solve fragmentation by closing the platform, and ending it's primary incentive to manufacturers. Meanwhile, the agreement it would need to use to do that, is already such an overreach, that it's being gone after for antitrust in several countries. In order to reach this Google fanboy's utopia, the agreement would need to get much more illegal than it is now.
pducks32 10y ago
Haha yea I know a lot of people who hate green bubbles.
supercoder 10y ago
How TechCrunch gets to 100% clickbait.

44 points by colincarter41 10y ago

"Anecdotally, one of the most frequently cited reasons among iPhone users for staying with iOS is that they love the “blue bubbles.” No way. I don't use iMessage (instead I use Whatsup) but I dont consider Android. I have a Motorola G3 also (work) but the Os is confusing, slow and crash frequently.

Oletros 10y ago
The OS slow and crash frequently?
- vetinari 10y ago
  Didn't you know? Windows on circa 2009 Atom netbook is also slow and crashes frequently, therefore Windows is a bad, slow, crashy OS. (Tongue in cheek, obviously).
  - pawadu 10y ago
    incidentally, I know a best selling author who wrote his two first books on a 2009 atom netbook. (conclusion: stop blaming the tools and get back to work)
IkmoIkmo 10y ago
Yeah, cmon... Text messages sent per day peaked in 2011 and have declined ever since, we're now half a decade later. In fact just last month we heard FB and Whatsapp process 60 billion daily messages and growing, SMS 20 billion and dropping. Further, a decent chunk of those SMS messages are from feature phones, i.e. on an iPhone the SMS to IM ratio is more significant than 1:3 and again, growing. Early on, especially for families, iMessage was somewhat of a big deal. But today and into the future? My whole family is on Whatsapp, from age 10 to age 70 and we all have each others' numbers. We exchange text, videos, voice recording, pictures, there's absolutely zero draw from iMessage. I use SMS exclusively for things like 2FA.
- blackoil 10y ago
  Most SMS, I receive right now are promotional messages or transactional messages from bank, airlines etc. Friend and Family have stopped sending SMS for a while now.
josephmx 10y ago
That's a big flaw with Android, people make unfair comparisons because the average Android phone is cheap. Using your example: Motorola G3 (July 2015, £150 currently on Amazon) iPhone 6s (September 2015, £497 currently on Amazon) Obviously a device costing more than 3X as much is going to perform better, eg my S6 (£355, also 2015) almost never crashes and is fast.

Shivetya 10y ago

I am not sure which phone my father has, but based on searches for trying to solve a simple issue on his it seems like something many Android users have. I cannot delete his email account off the phone. There is no method short of pointing it to a bad email address and provider that I can find and I am not sure it would even allow that change. Really, there is no option anywhere to delete. I did get it to stop pulling email down automatically and when opened. As in, give a consistent and easy to use presentation. Each phone company seems able to totally muck it up but they all have odd issues in common

vezycash 10y ago
If the email you're trying to remove is the email used to register the phone, it can only be removed by resetting the phone. The same thing applies to Windows phone.
- IkmoIkmo 10y ago
  That's not standard though, I don't even have email setup on my S7 on the standard email app, although I've got my phone registered... although I did get the Gmail app and set up mail later, and I can indeed delete it.
almostdvs 10y ago
I ran into this the other day. Under accounts, you tap the account you want to delete. There should be the option to remove account in the menu button ... It just says sync now. Tap the account again. That took a few hours to figure out.

charlesdenault 10y ago

I believe the fragmentation issue is going to take a lot longer to solve than the author leads on. Android is rooted in its open nature, and it's what caused the proliferation of the OS in the first place. It's going to take much longer for OEMs to stop shipping bloatware on the devices, or Google will effectively fork the OS simply because the OEMs can't keep up. Look how long it's taken Microsoft to get their OEMs to comply (but I do believe Google is a different beast in this regard).

viraptor 10y ago
Depends on the contract really... do we know what terms do the OEMs sign? If Google is free to change the terms on renewal, then they can simply state "must provide updates for X years, up to Y days after upstream, cannot change Z - or you can't call it Android". That would either cause an instant solution or instant full-OEM-forks.
pjmlp 10y ago
Fragmentation is an old beast. Android is no better than what we had with Symbian, J2ME or proprietary mobile OSes that came before current crop of mobile OSes. As long as OEM and networks have the last word on firmware, it will always exist´, in name of product differentiation.
- viraptor 10y ago
  It's way better than J2ME and lightyears ahead of proprietary OSes. If you think that's not the case, I don't think you remember those times very well. With J2ME it was basically close to impossible to create any app apart from the most basic ones without producer-specific APIs. Nokia, Siemens, Samsung, Motorola, etc. - they all had their own special extensions. Even if some game was released for more than one handset, each make had its own version. (Although it was possible to write a translation layer - I wrote a nokia-to-siemens translating classes which worked in most cases) Now you may have issues with versions of Android and which features you can support. You may also have issues with different resolutions. But it's nowhere as bad as in 2002.

philliphaydon 10y ago

I moved from android to iphone to Windows phone to android to iphone. I'm sticking with iphone. Android has been the worst experience for me. Had an old HTC with 2.# and a Samsung note4, plagued with issues. The thing that annoyed me most (besides Samsung bugs like not being able to remove keyboard notification) is when you register with an email, you cannot use the same email for another service. My contacts exist on my windows live account which happens to be my gmail addy, when I register the phone with gmail I cannot sign in with windows live using the same email because the email already exists. A bug that doesn't happen on Windows phone or iphone. Coupled with slow buggy laggy android phones, and malware. I ditched iphone. Android with so much market share is not a good thing either. Just a IE scenario all over again.

viraptor 10y ago
I'm having trouble understanding your issue with email addresses. What do you mean by "another service"? What do you mean by "register the phone with gmail"? What do you mean by "sign in with windows live"?
- IkmoIkmo 10y ago
  I've got no clue, I use the same email account for gmail, microsoft, samsung, facebook etc. I have lots of services with the same email setup.
- philliphaydon 10y ago
  My gmail is registered as a Windows Live account. So same email / different password / different service. I store all my contacts on my Windows Live account. ----- When you register the phone with a Google Account it automatically creates an Account for the email associated to the Google Account. I then want to add a Windows Live account in order to sync my contacts. Android OS prevents this by disallowing the registration of the Windows Live service by telling me that the email address is already associated with an account.
pjmlp 10y ago
I will never get an iPhone as it is a luxury on my part of the planet or when I eventually do get one, it will most likely be second hand. The Windows Phone developer stack is great in regards to Android, but with all the missteps Microsoft did, the last being the failure to fulfill the promise of upgrading all WP 8.1 devices to WP 10, we really only have Android as viable alternative to iOS.

goodcanadian 10y ago

I haven't read the article, and I love my Android phone, but I sincerely hope Android never approaches 100%. Monoculture is never a good thing.

amelius 10y ago
True, except that as a developer I'd prefer to target only one architecture. Now we're forced to write apps for iOS and Android and the web separately.
- dkopi 10y ago
  Interestingly, you consider "the web" a single target, and not "Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, Opera, IE" on "Linux, Windows, MacOS, IOS, Android" And we consider android a single target, and not "Samsung, HTC, Motorola, Sony..." We don't need android hegemony for easier development. We need cross platform development tools.
- hellofunk 10y ago
  I don't think that will ever change but toolkits that let you target more than one platform will continue to improve (like Qt).
- spriggan3 10y ago
  > True, except that as a developer I'd prefer to target only one architecture. Now we're forced to write apps for iOS and Android and the web separately. How is it a bad thing ? more work == more money for you as a developer.
  - adrianN 10y ago
    Some people like to do interesting work instead of doing basically the same thing over and over again.
  - dkopi 10y ago
    More work == more developers needed to get the same job done == less productivity == lower wages.

coldcode 10y ago

Nuclear bomb on Apple campus? This isn't 1995 and Windows. If anything Android becomes even more fragmented both for commercial reasons and by government meddling requiring different things in different countries until the OS is split up. Saying you are "Android" requires Google's restrictive license and that grates on lots of manufacturers who would love to be out from under their thumb and control their business. Don't forget that Apple still makes almost 90% of the profit from building devices. That is Android's weakness. Even Google doesn't directly make much. You may love your phone but if building it doesn't make the suppliers money something has to give.

Zigurd 10y ago
As an OEM you have basically two choices: 1. Do Android. You can crap it up with bloatware, or you can resign yourself to non-differentiation in software features and try to distinguish your products in hardware. 2. You can dick around with a badly supported oddball OSs and go back to Android after you waste some money. Nobody is putting in the effort it takes to compete with Android. Maybe someone should put in the investment to compete with Android, but it isn't true that "something has to give." It is possible to compete with Android, but that will cost many tens of millions, and maybe hundreds of millions just to try. Samsung won't put that kind of money into Tizen. Who else has the potential to compete? Really, the OEMs have nobody but themselves to blame for poor margins. If they can't think beyond bloatware "differentiation" they deserve their outcomes.

Buetol 10y ago

They fly over the biggest details of all: The price. For 100$ you can get the Moto E 2nd gen and I consider it a very high-end phone (nice screen, fast, latest version of android).

mcphage 10y ago
The author mentions that—and that the fact that carrier contracts are dying means that US consumers will become more price conscious. However, Apple's high margins mean that iPhones are more expensive because Apple wants them to be (and people will pay it). I don't expect iPhone prices to ever be as low as Android prices, but if Apple needs to, they can drop their prices and still make money on their phones. They just don't want to (because they like making money), and it's yet not clear that they have to.
msh 10y ago
But a very crappy camera.

forgettableuser 10y ago

This author has a pretty cynical view that the only reason people use iPhone is because of vendor lock-in, like from iMessage. This disregards the fact that many iPhone customers are still first time buyers with no lock in hanging over their head. And also Apple has an extremely high customer satisfaction rate keeping customers coming back. Customers buy iPhones because they like the experience and ecosystem, not solely due to some service lock-in.

JoeAltmaier 10y ago
I don't think there are any more first-time buyers of phones left in the world. Really. Its not a thing any more. Also no first-time shoe buyers, or food buyers. Except maybe the very young trickling into the market.
- PKop 10y ago
  First time iPhone buyers, coming from Android, for example.
- forgettableuser 10y ago
  I meant first time Apple buyers which includes both people who've never had phones and people who've switched. Apple's first time customer base is still significant.
- chimeracoder 10y ago
  > I don't think there are any more first-time buyers of phones left in the world I might believe you if you said the US, but given how low iPhone penetration is outside the US, combined with how many new people use the Internet for the first time each day in India alone (100,000,000 per year, most of that being accessed over a mobile device), it's clear that smartphones haven't hit 100% potential market penetration the way "food" has.
SeanDav 10y ago
First time buyers generally base their choices on the opinions and views of more experienced people, often within their circle of friends, family and acquaintances. It is quite conceivable that a first time buyer is making their choice because of the vendor lock-in of their peers.

patwolf 10y ago

My grandfather was a Ford man. He would only ever buy a Ford, even during periods when other manufacturers were making vastly superior vehicles. I used to think such loyalty was a silly generational thing. My generation was a fickle consumer. We would research and decide on a purchase based purely on merit. That's how I was with phones. When iPhone was the most compelling phone, I would buy an iPhone. When there was a more compelling Android phone, I would buy that. However, as I get older I'm starting to understand loyalty, and it's not what I expected. It isn't a dogmatic belief in a brand. It's recognizing that sometimes it's easier to stick with what works and not worry about whether there's something better out there. Now that we've been living with smartphones for a while, and they mostly just work, I don't expect people find as much value in switching between Android and iOS. As long as both exist, neither will ever reach 100% market share.

vlan0 10y ago
I find a lot of those brand loyalist tend to be foolish in many ways. They make decisions based on emotion, rather than analytical thought. I worked in retail for a good part of a decade, and I was dumbfounded by the number of people who would never buy another product from X manufacture based on a single poor experience with one product. It's simply an emotional response to their unpleasant experience which results in the person making a decision without statistical data to validate their idea. Which seems like nothing more than just plain ignorance.
- mathgeek 10y ago
  Keep in mind that many people spend a lot of analytical time on other aspects of their adult life: work, vacations, insurance, children (including paying for college), home maintenance, etc. Sometimes smartphone and entertainment fall into the group of things just not worth spending your limited thinking time on.
- Touche 10y ago
  Or making the statistically correct purchasing decision is not the most important thing in their life.
- 10y ago

Amir6 10y ago

If something works and as long as it is not such a crucial part of your life and its a matter of life and death, you can (in many cases) always go with what has worked previously. One other argument can be the cost benefit analysis of the research itself. The time and energy (which ultimately translates to money in some sense) you put on research may not be worth the feature(s) one option offers over the other. You may never use that feature or in case of price, how much you may have to more for the brand you are loyal to may be less expensive than the risk you take by going with an option which you yourself have not tested first hand.

hathym 10y ago

I have an iPhone and will keep it forever just to make sure Android will never make it to 100% market share ( evil smiley )

ocdtrekkie 10y ago

This post seems to ignore some huge points. Google can only solve fragmentation by closing the platform, and ending it's primary incentive to manufacturers. Meanwhile, the agreement it would need to use to do that, is already such an overreach, that it's being gone after for antitrust in several countries. In order to reach this Google fanboy's utopia, the agreement would need to get much more illegal than it is now.

pducks32 10y ago

Haha yea I know a lot of people who hate green bubbles.

supercoder 10y ago

How TechCrunch gets to 100% clickbait.