Apple

Android sucks. It feels like a budget, second-rate product. It’s not polished. It’s for nerds who like to customize everything. You open the web browser and it just seems janky. That’s my experience.

I think outside of iMessage, Apple just gets the US market, which isn't a surprise I guess because Apple is an American company. The way they advertise their phones and design their features feel like they are all optimized for the US market first. A lot of new features like Apple Card and redesigned Apple Maps always come to US markets while other big markets have to wait a long time before Apple brings them over.

There are other small things like the heavily app-focused design, which favors a lot of different apps that each does one thing and one thing well. This is different from how a lot of emerging markets have superapps (e.g. WeChat) that will dominate your daily life. A quick example: iOS has built-in non-customizable QR code scanning (either as a quick action from Control Center, or automatically from the camera app). This is useful let's say you want to scan a restaurant menu or an URL link. But let's say you live in China, most of the QRs codes you see are usually WeChat / Alipay links that you have to open the specific app and scan the code from there, making a built-in OS feature completely useless.

And of course iMessage itself is also a uniquely N American thing because a lot of other countries moved organically to other apps like WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat and so on.

The iPhones are also priced expensive enough (Apple doesn't do price differentiation across markets) that in a lot of lower income countries they are just too expensive compared to lower-priced Android devices, whereas in US, the general income level is high enough that they are affordable (but still expensive) to a lot of folks.

I do wonder about the specific markets like Japan, since iPhones are also really popular there, and I wonder what Apple is doing specifically right there comparatively? (iPhones are popular everywhere but I feel that in Japan specifically it's even more popular. Maybe because of a lack of good local competition?)

FaceTime is also higher with kids these days, they literally hang out on FT for hours.

I live in Germany and people in my age started to state that an Android would be a "red flag" or "cringe".😅

I don’t see how Android can really change its brand identity for the better when it has very little brand identity to speak of.

I move from an Android phone to a different Android phone, and I will lose quality of life features because the Android skin is different.

Which probably also makes it harder to lock users in because unless you always stick with the same brand, you would be fairly used to adjusting to feature loss.

Android is “customizable” but you can’t even get your phone to reach feature parity with the last phone you were using.

Apple marketing (and product/design) has consistently trumped Android in this regard, and it has paid off here.

I'm sure the list of things that have not been cool with teenagers but somehow carved out a profitable market for themselves is a lot larger than this author thinks it is.

But to play ball with the line of thinking, maybe the whole platform being so hit and miss when it comes to feature set, performance, price, ad infestation, etc has something to do with it. Cable TV isn't cool with teenagers either, probably for much the same reasons.

It also doesn't help that most Android OEMs fall over themselves to follow Apple in a great many ways instead of trying to create their own path.

Why is this a problem?

I think it’s the fans. Most people have iPhones and don’t really TALK about iPhones. Android owners GO OFF about iPhones. It’s cringey behavior and puts people off. You don’t want to be associated with that kind of person, nerdy or dorky or just overtly negative over really nothing *when you’re a teenager, as it’s social suicide. Even Samsung ads give off that vibe. The phones could be the next best thing , but if the owners are douchecanoes and the marketing plays into it then it’s not really going to vibe with the kiddos, no matter how good of a product is out there.

I keep reading this is “a US issue”. It isn’t and it isn’t just iMessage. In Japan, walk up and down the crowds in the subway and an astounding majority of people have an iPhone. Most people are using Line to message. There’s more to it than blue text bubbles.

I don't see any problems

Literally not a problem for anyone but Google, a company.

This isn’t an apple issue and really doesn’t belong on this sub other than to be pedantic about apple being superior

I’m guessing something like lack of competition for apple may stagnate innovation but in apples case I don’t think they react to external pressures like that anyway.

I just got gifted an Android Tablet which is my first foray back into Android in about 8 years. Holy hell, using it is like going back to the Stone Age. It’s so infuriating because there are so many things that with iOS are just baked into it that now I have to go out to the Play Store to find something that works.

Weather? Why the hell is there no default weather app? Guess I’ll go research and figure out the best one. Oh, I need a task list? Well shit, there isn’t one of those either. Back to the Play store to look through the thousands of task list apps.

Then most of the options for things you do download on the Play Store are absolutely terrible. I’ve been using this Android Tablet for 3 weeks now and the one thing it has taught me is that I’m not moving away from iOS any time soon.

They would need to completely revamp the branding if they want to market towards younger non-tech interested individuals. Simplify the hardware/software and boost marketing with a cool and luxury focus. I don’t think feature improvement is required for this problem in NA, you need to change the nerdy alternative image people have in their minds when they think Android.

But they basically own the rest of the world so idk if this is even an issue.

Fear the green text bubble

It's almost like all of the things that the anti-Apple bandwagon complains about are the things that everybody else likes about Apple. Simplicity. Design. Device interconnectivity. Social features that only work with other iPhones.

Call these things "gimmicks," all you want. It's not a gimmick if it works.

Huh??? O_o

https://preview.redd.it/9dwjom6q8k0c1.jpeg?width=1290&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=87c538870eec6187074dde33a9e5c24f2dc8371d

Thanks for posting this. This is a huge problem for Apple.

IMHO, companies do best with competition. An Android was a formidable competitor.

Also, anti-trust issues could become an issue in the future, even though there really isn't a problem.

Same thing happened with Microsoft back in the day. They were the de facto standard, and supposedly had anti-trust issues. But it was just people choosing Microsoft.

Likewise, it is just teenagers choosing Apple.

Android needs to become cool, so Apple has a formidable competitor. Even though Apple is still best overall IMHO.

I tried so hard during my teenage years to love Android. The apps crashed a lot and the tablets were so incredibly unreliable. The app experience was fragmented. It’s all just a no-go personally.

It’s not cool with anyone

it literally never was... there was never a point where any young person wanted an android over an iphone in any timeline...

My 11 year old has a Samsung s23 because I wasn’t impressed with Apple parental controls. Android works much better with the Bark monitoring service. She will get an iPhone when she turns 16 and I start loosening the reigns a bit. So far no bullying although she has expressed she wants an iPhone, but she knows why I chose android and doesn’t fight me on it. She’s had an iPad forever and I just upgraded her to an Air 5 with cellular, she wants a career in digital art so I want to support her in that to the best of my ability. Her best friend only has an iPad so she can communicate well with them. I’d love for her to have an iPhone but it was just not possible for me to monitor appropriately at her age.