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Comment by Mikeb85 | Hacker News Reader

Considering how many people are "choosing" Android, I'd say a good many of us like choice....

Considering how many people end up with it by default because it's the cheap (or free) option would suggest otherwise...

That's the real key, it's popular because it's cheap, imagine trying to claim Chevy makes a better car than BMW because more people buy Chevy.

I don't know anybody who has a "cheap" Android phone. They are all SGS4, HTC One, etc. which are around the same price as the iPhone.

These phones represent a fraction of the overall android market, almost 1/3 of android phones are much cheaper devices still running 2.2/2.3, etc.

edit: Revised most to 1/3.

That's not true though.

http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html

Fixed that for you, 1/3 of android devices are still trapped <= 2.3

You should also revise "These phones represent a fraction of the overall android market" to "These phones represent the majority of the overall android market."

In markets where handsets are subsidized, it's no cheaper than an iPhone...

And around here, no one has cheap Android handsets - it's all Galaxy S4s, HTC Ones, and Note 2/3s...

Price is also part of the buying decision making process, e.g. choice.

The insinuation that always seems to follow this line of thinking is that the choice and popularity is made on technical merit alone.

No. That's a pathetic, played-out canard.

If you're building a knock-off phone in a Chinese sweatshop, are you going to hire a team of engineers to spend man-decades developing an OS, or are you going to use the FREE one?

Yeah, that's why the whole Android "market share" charade is a bunch of bullshit.

"Samsung shipped a record 213 million smartphones, due in large part to its new Galaxy S2 and S3 models.

Apple shipped a reported (estimated) 135.8 million smartphones — iPhone5 and iPhone4 models."

The S2 and S3 are hardly "knock-off phones".

That there aren't any low-end iphone, and the fact that you can use most apps on low end Android phones as well as on high end ones, just makes Android that more attractive in my opinion.

My previous phone was a Samsung S1 (unfortunately they were a bit rushed, and had crappy GPS -- even if everything else was great). My current phone is a Galaxy Note II -- and I also have a cheap, spare HTC Explorer phone that I can use for prototyping ideas with a physical device (anything that needs GPS/Accelerometer/Screen/Camera+software). And it could be used for deploying pretty much anything in a very cheap and straightforward package (even has usb, wifi and bluetooth for linking with other systems...).

source:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/tjmccue/2013/01/28/does-apple-ip...

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