Ask HN: Android is rapidly losing the US market. What can Google do about this? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Android is rapidly losing the US market. What can Google do about this?

13 pointsretskrad46 comments

It's looking quite bleak for Android. The iPhone has conquered 57% of the US smartphone market, which is the most important market. It is the most culturally influential and people have the most dispoable income. Losing this market would be disastrous and there's no recovering from that.

The Android brand has become so undesireable by the US population that you will be ostracied from group chats and your potential dating pool shrinks when they see those green bubbles. Can Google stop the bleeding and do something about this or is Apple going to swallow the entire US market without resistence?

View on HN

If someone doesn't date me because I don't have an iPhone then I just dodged a bullet.

I don't understand what's being claimed here. Is Google at risk because they only have 43% of the US market?

Google's hardware income is negligible; it's Samsung who'd feel that impact. Google makes money from ads and APIs. Every American could use an iPhone exclusively, and they'd still be putting the same amount of money in Google's pockets every time they open Youtube, Gmail, browse the web or use Uber (uses GMaps API).

As for being ostracized from group chats.....I hope college will be better for these people than high school was.

Small marketshare never seemed to be a colossal issue for the Mac, nor Linux. People who want x will buy or use x because y and because z doesn't y.

Android has a 71% market share worldwide. I don't think it is in trouble.

And yes, I am flat out rejecting your premise that the US is the most important market. There are literally billions of people in this world who are not from there.

Agreed. There are many, many smartphone brands that sell/operate only in Asia, and some only in Europe.

I don't know of any brand that operates solely in the US. And the number of brands available here is ever shrinking, down to what 5 or 6?

Revenue is what matters the most. What country contributes

I worry that Android could become the Firefox of mobile, or even lose support for some applications if iOS becomes too dominant in OECD/developed countries.

For many businesses the cost of developing a native android app might not justify the revenue created by developing countries and low income OECD users.

Even now, I doubt it’s worth developing a native android app if your target audience have an income above $100,000. Or a video game where most of your revenue comes from whales that spend over $100 a month on in app purchases.

The cheapest iPhone Apple sells is only $429 and the used market isn't too bad either for an iOS device that works well.

I think at this point some of the mid-range phone buyers might look to Apple too. Especially kids.

Yeah Apple presently dominate the upper income segment of the market but they’re starting to win the middle class too.

Most businesses don't need to develop a native application though. Most businesses don't even need an app in the store now that PWAs on iOS support push notifications and circumvent any Apple approval.

I know plenty of folks with incomes in the millions and net worths in the billions who use Android. How much people earn or are worth really isn't a good indicator of what device they'll use.

Remember when Apple pulled Fortnite from the iOS App Store? CoD Warzone seems to do alright on Android. Pokemon Go, anyone? Minecraft? Roblox? Given most people use Unity or Unreal engines, it's not difficult or any more meaningfully expensive to target Android as far as games go. Xbox Game Pass is a roaring success too, beating out even Google's own Stadia.

> How much people earn or are worth really isn't a good indicator of what device they'll use.

Globally it is a good indicator in the sense that people in high income countries use iOS devices more often [1][2]

If you’re in a country with GDP per capita >$5k then you’re almost certainly using an android device.

Unfortunately within country all the data I can find is either uselessly old or from unreliable sources. Generally still says iOS users earn more but I accept that we can’t draw too much from it e.g [3]

> Most businesses don't even need an app in the store now that PWAs on iOS support..

> Given most people use Unity or Unreal engines, it's not difficult or any more meaningfully expensive to target Android as far as games go

Yeah, to the extent that application developers target web, PWAs, 3rd party game engines or even React Native/Flutter the platforms matter less and the economically smaller platforms can do better.

However, there’s a lot of variation by industry vertical here. True native apps (using Apple/Google frameworks like SwiftUI/UIKit/SceneKit/Jetpack etc) are pretty rare in gaming but more common in finance/travel/auto/music.

I imagine therefore the latter are the ones to worry about if Android becomes minority in the OECD.

[1]https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/22702/andoid-ios-market-s... [2]https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/iphone-ma... [3] https://www.comscore.com/ita/Public-Relations/Infographics/i...

> which is the most important market. It is the most culturally influential and people have the most dispoable income

Yet the majority of people outside of the US choose Android. Plenty of large markets and developed countries outside of the US.

Then I have to question. Who is being influenced culturally by the US preference for iPhone?

> Then I have to question. Who is being influenced culturally by the US preference for iPhone?

I'm not sure how much the "US preference" plays in this, but in my country, the iPhone is the aspirational device. Apple hardware is, generally speaking.

OP definitely needs a more nuanced assessment of the US market, but its hard to ignore the influence it has on non-US consumers.

I come from a poor country. I understand people covet Apple products as status symbols, not because of the product itself.

I happen to now live in a developed country, where people can afford iPhones. The vast majority owns Androids anyway.

Counterpoint: iPhones dominate the majority of the premium phone market share

https://www.gizchina.com/2023/03/21/iphone-dominates-75-of-t...

That would lead to believe that people who can afford to do so, majorly choose iPhones and the dominance of Android appears to be more budget conscious uses.

—-

I think that looking at overall market share as a trend marker is flawed. You need to look at it for demographics like age and price.

The iPhone dominates among younger demographics and more affluent demographics.

I think that means we’ll see iPhone market share worldwide grow as the current youth become a larger percentage of the population, and also due to Apple moving manufacturing to India, which will reduce the high taxes.

I don’t expect the iPhone to take over the market there because even the SE is quite expensive BUT I do expect it to take over the middle and upper class now that Apple has stores there, and can potentially reduce taxes.

I’ve gone back and forth between android and iOS since the original Galaxy S and iPhone 3G , so I’m not trying to justify one over another fwiw. Just hoping to add more nuance.

I don't think it's a big issue, as there are bigger markets out there than the US. Android is quite popular in Europe and Asia.

I live in Canada and I personally find iOS undesirable because of how locked down it is, so I don't plan to switch anytime soon.

> Android is quite popular in Europe and Asia.

...and Africa. Couldn't have gotten into mobile app development in my student days without cheap, readily available Android devices. It was also a great help that Android dev tools are accessible.

I was recently in Korea and surprised to see how many iPhones there were in the Republic of Samsung.

My last time there was right before Covid in 2019, where iPhones were somewhat of a rarity. Samsung Galaxies ruled everywhere.

Now, everywhere I went I saw iPhones in Seoul, especially younger people. Android phones (including Samsung) seem to be mostly in the hands of older people.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-iphones-are-winning-over...

> Around 52% of people age 18 to 29 in South Korea were using an Apple smartphone as of 2022, up from 44% two years earlier, according to polls by Gallup Korea.

Why wouldn't there be? It's a status symbol there, same way in which an entry-level BMW stateside would be a status symbol over a Ford or GM car.

Intuition would say the local brand(s) would always have a home town advantage.

LG pulled out of the phone market a while ago, but that Samsung doesn’t even have the majority of use among the youth in its home playing field is surprising, to me at least.

Is it the most important market? USA is only 331m people. What are your metrics of "importance"?

Do Apple users have the most disposable income or are they heavy credit users? Because Apple's credit system and paying for devices on the drip accounts for a big uptick in Champagne-lifestyle-lemonade-budget social media influencers. "Dress for the job you want, not the one you have".

I see plenty of iPhones on the local council estate, and I see lots of BMWs, and designer clothing, seemingly mimicking the "yuppies" of yore. Do you think they're actually wealthy? Or do you think it's more likely to be bought on the drip? Klarna is huge too.

I reluctantly switched from Android to iOS last year. I wanted to stay with Android. I miss many features of my Android like web-based messages integration, and a Message app that doesn’t eat messages (send or cancel… are you kidding me?). I liked freedom of choice. But, I was not confident that any of the Android offerings of the time had quality hardware or software that would last years. Android desperately needs a premium offering with white glove service. Someone that stands behind their product for years, not walk away after the sale. To win back kids, there needs to be cachet. They can’t just meet Apple’s quality and convenience — they need to exceed it. They need less vendor-specific bloatware and a great experience and integration out of the box.

Walled garden is not good. But I found it much harder to develop the same app functionality on Android (native).

Android SDK is harder to learn, gradle upgrade often break build, compatibility libraries are quite confusing (which one should I use??) and hardware support for the same capability is very diverse.

Case in point, android.camera, android.camera2, androidx.camera are so different from each other that you almost have to rewrite to shift to the next generation.

iOS AVFoundation, relatively speaking, is easier to pickup and stable over the years.

Opportunities for Android I can think of to reverse this trend towards Apple: Satellite connectivity support, advanced gaming and deep integration with smart home things (e.g. Ikea)

> Android SDK is harder to learn

Google has made a lot of effort to fix this with AndroidX and Jetpack libraries, and the push for Modern Android Development (MAD).

Indeed. Hopefully it stays stable for a while so developers can catch up.

Developers developers developers!

There's also an uphill climb in terms of expected ROI. Apple requires all Apple accounts to have a payment method linked. Apple customers tend to spend more. iPhones have a shorter list of models to test against.

If the young are driving iPhone adoption there could be good reasons for it. I don't think the culture battle is winnable here.

Android doesn't really offer something iOS/iPhones lacks. The iPhone has matured and Apple has all bases covered with their ecosystem.

If there's feature parity why wouldn't you just get the desirable option? People want a repeatable experience and iPhones offer this because of obvious reasons, a few devices vs thousands with android.

Apple is perceived as the premium brand while being affordable, when you're young at least this matters a lot.

> Android doesn't really offer something iOS/iPhones lacks.

My Android does not claim to keep the internet connection open after I close it.

Apple will happilly communicate with mothership even if you turn off mobile data or wifi.

>Apple will happily communicate with mothership even if you turn off mobile data or wifi.

can you elaborate on this? how are they doing this?

The biggest challenge for android IMO is Apple's Messages. It's clearly a degraded experience having an android user in the GC that some people will create a second GC without the android user in it.

Do people in the US really use Apple Messages? I've never encountered it here in Europe. It's basically all just WhatsApp or - if you're in more "tech-y" circles - Telegram or Signal.

Even as an iOS user/developer it’s hard for me to imagine people choosing to use messages over one of the alternatives, I don’t get this about the US. Is it really a status thing?

Same, I don't get why would people use Apple Messages that is only for android over Whatsapp. What is the advantage of APple Messages?

Yes. It’s the default messaging app for iOS, which is very popular in the US. It has strong network effects now. No one I know in the US uses WA unless they are immigrants. Everyone else is iMessage, snap, or SMS for android

SMS/MMS is still (sadly) quite common in the US and on iPhones that means using the built-in Messages app. So if you want a non-SMS/MMS that's also widely used in the US you get it "for free" by using iMessages from the same application if you're an iPhone user. And this chat also works with your non-iPhone contacts because it switches to SMS/MMS for them.

For whatever reason WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, and others never won out on Android in the US so the Android users didn't bring along their iPhone using network to those clients either (in bulk).

Google of course has lost out because of their own foolishness: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-...

Other than the deliberately lower contrast text what is different? I've never had an Apple phone myself.

If all members of a group chat use iMessage the experience is relatively smooth and modern. When at least one member is not using iMessage the entire group chat falls back to MMS. Photos and videos sent over MMS are heavily re-compressed. There's no encryption or read receipts. iMessage only features like stickers don't work. There's still various MMS interoperability glitches like out of order delivery, emoji turning into :1234:, and failed delivery.

When the smartphone era began cellular carriers required customers to buy both data and SMS/MMS components of their service plan. iMessage let iPhone customers save on the SMS/MMS tariff portion of their cellphone plan. [1] Eventually carriers reacted to protect their revenue by simply bundling unlimited SMS/MMS and calling into a new higher base plan price. That killed motivation for Americans to adopt a free alternative like Whatsapp unlike the rest of the world. The messages app on iOS mostly abstracts away whether a message is delivered over the Internet or legacy MMS, except for this blue/green color.

Apple considers iMessage popularity an important vendor lock in moat. Carriers don't have any motivation to deploy RCS as it won't yield any more revenue, and especially since Apple won't. Customers strongly refer free messaging over paid and take the path of least resistance. People generally just pick the lowest common denominator communication channel instead of burning time and social capital getting their friends and acquaintances to install Signal, Whatsapp, etc.

Message fragmentation is also not helped by Google's constant re-branding and product cancellations. In markets where non-smartphone owners cannot be ignored, the lowest common denominator is still SMS or email.

[1] https://9to5mac.com/2012/05/04/att-ceo-imessage-disrupts-our...

I'm biased as I hate what google slowly started to do once they got their mitts on android.

I was a late android user, in 2015 or so given a 2011 phone and marvelled at it's power compared to my old desktop. Want to do stuff, no worries, swap files around between sd media, no worries, and so much more it was basically a hand held computer except I didn't have root access but I was so impressed when I got the opportunity to buy a couple more reasonably cheap newer android phones ... semi usable is how I'd describe my experience, the latest being used only as a phone and camera ... when I turn it on ... since it was the one the only way to empty junk ad files in it's limited memory was a hard factory reset, no cleaning tool could do it before it simply ran out of memory ... note it was not a Samsung like my first phone that was gifted to me.

The big killer was no wifi connection app for 2018 phone could be found that connected to free wifi with login connection (ie the native one was not going to play second fiddle) ... while 2012 software on a laptop copes.

Basically google could loosen their grip a bit, and not try to run one's phone from the shadows ... or not, but what do I care, mine sit in the dark 99.9% of the time turned off.

I suspect Iphones actually cater to the way people have recently been educated. As I grew up my schooling taught me as a first principle that to learn something you had to understand it. Now my children/grandchildren are quite happy to learn about things and never seek to understand them. As consumers those same people just don't want/need to know about security or crashes or how everything connects they just want it to work seamlessly. Iphones do exactly that. As consumers they don't care that IOS is Unix based, they just want to send messages, photos text etc. You get a choice of 1 for most programmes. With Android you get multiple choice to do anything, some work some don't. Political propaganda says that this program or that is monitored by (insert choice of "nasty" government) so consumers can't tell what is correct or not so they avoid making the choice by going Iphone. By the way it is probably more likely that we do not have to understand things to use them. No? Ask people how the stock market works and you will never get 2 answers the same.

The US market is a mere 5% of the World Market. You could lose all of the US market, and you'd just have to make do with only 95% of the World Market, I suppose.

In truth, Android is by far the market leader, anyway: Three quarters of all smartphones in the world run Android

https://www.businessofapps.com/data/android-statistics/

It's worse than that because iPhone has more like 80% market share for young people in the US.

Pichai is that you?

The apple ecosystem is just such a seamless and enjoyable experience. Airdrop, AirPods handoff, the Apple Watch is unparalleled.. it’s going to be tough for anyone to cut in unless Apple offers some form of interoperability l

> The apple ecosystem is just such a seamless and enjoyable experience. Airdrop

This has not been my experience with Airdrop, unfortunately. Transferring files from my iPhone to my 2015 MBP via Telegram is far more predictable experience than relying on Airdrop.

And I absolutely loathe that Apple makes it impossible to Bluetooth files to my aged Windows/Linux PC. Terrible UX.

I've been sending files from OSX to my Android phone via Bluetooth for years with no issues; I love not having to use cloud or email or some wifi relay service to do this.

Apple blocking this functionality on iPhone to force people into their very NIH Airdrop 'solution' is exactly the kind of anti-consumer move that turns me off of iPhones. Heck, if Linux doesn't work properly on the new ARM Macs, I might dump Mac OS too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com