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Comment by anbende | Hacker News Reader

We likely have a baserate problem here. Most phones are android, so if someone just picked at random, they’d usually pick android. This doesn’t always mean ‘android loyalty’. It could as easily mean ‘price loyalty’ or ‘carrier promotion loyalty’. If someone picks iOS, with its smaller market share and number of phones, it is more likely brand loyalty to Apple/iOS.

So the two loyalty numbers are not exactly comparable

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Question: have you read the article? Loyalty rate is defined as the number of users who switched from one platform to the other in the last year over the number of user on the departing platform. They even say that the absolute number looks different because of the bigger market share of Android.

Now, your argument is that someone who chose to stay with a device with smaller CB is more loyal, but what the article is saying is that out of 100 Android user, around 90 bought a new Android when replacing the phone, while only 86 Apple user bought a new iPhone.

I don't see how you dispute this fact as an evidence that Android users are more loyal. Even an argument on network advantage doesn't work because Android phones are very compatible with Apple ones (not the other way around) and the Apple ecosystem is still pretty big...

Let me put it this way. You walk into a Verizon store and see 15 cell phones. 2-3 of them are iOS. The other 12-13 are android. Buying an iOS device is likely to mean that your an Apple fan. Buying an android might mean that you like android. Or it might mean you like the particular phone, or you might be price conscious. All things that are not “android loyalty”.

One problem is that iOS is essentially the same thing as iPhone in terms of purchasing decisions. This is not true for android. Ergo, it’s not safe to equate the phone and OS in the android world but it mostly is in the iOS world.

Okay, but you're essentially telling someone whose job it is to produce this data that they're doing it wrong. Maybe they have already thought about this. Its far more likely that techcrunch is misrepresenting the data with their headline. :)

I’m a scientist. I do that all the time. :)

And no, I did not check the underlying article. I think my point stands regardless though. iOS/iPhone and Android/a bunch of different phones are not interpretable in the same way. There’s no real way to “account” for this

Today, Android has a 91 percent loyalty rate, compared with 86 percent for iOS, measured as the percentage of U.S. customers who stayed with their operating system when they upgraded their phone in 2017.

According to Statistica[1] Android has 53.6% of the U.S smartphone marketshare and iOS has 45%. So I would say those loyalty rate numbers are perfectly comparable.

[1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held...

The base rate issue here is not about market share, it’s about the number of phone choices. If I pick a phone at random, there’s a very high percentage chance it will be android, because there are dozens of phones by different makers.

There are what like 3-5 actively sold iPhone models? So is someone who trades in their Pixel for a Samsung “loyal to android” or did they just happen to like a phone that happened to be an android?

In the iPhone world the two go together, so brand loyalty = phone loyalty = OS loyalty

I disagree with your unsubstantiated claim that the loyalty rate is attributed to the number of Android phone choices. People that use Android stay with the OS because it's what they're used to and prefer.

Also, there are 8 actively sold iPhone models.

Price loyalty for Android is not as true today as it was 3 years ago. Apple now sells a variety of phones ranging from $350 to $1000+ USD. In developed countries, this certainly allows consumers to cross shop between Android and iOS.

They sell one phone for $350 - the iPhone SE. While I'm thinking about "upgrading" to the SE - I'm really starting to like the idea of a real small phone and my iPad - most people don't want a phone that size.

But $350 is still higher than the average price of an Android phone - $227

https://www.androidauthority.com/price-gap-samsung-apple-sma...

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