peter pinto

cali said:

Did some research and y'all should be pleased.

Samsung stocks saw the biggest drop in company history as concerns for #bombgate increased.

Polls by C Net and another company(sorry I forgot who) showed nearly half of potential Note 7 buyers are considering iPhone 7 instead.

Polls also showed Matte Black and Jet Black both make up over %90 of desired iPhone 7 colors.

Microsoft may be discontinuing Lumia Windows Phones in several stores and online according to customer reports and employees.

Why should I, as a consumer, be happy when a lot of Apple competitors are failing? Right now, I use an iPad with a Samsung screen - and a Samsung manufactured chip. That chip is running iOS 9, which has been influenced by Android in a lot of ways. 

I mean, you could even argue that the iPhone wouldn't be the powerhouse it is today, if there hadn't been tough competition! 

I especially hope that Windows mobile devices (or whatever they are called now) will do well - Windows do seem to embrace security more directly than Android. 

That being said, I do hope that all the tech reviewers who were star-struck by the semi-curved screens on the latest Samsung devices take a step back and recognise a simple fact of their profession: Stay critical!

rotateleftbyte said:

To quote
It is true that messaging is a primary use of mobile devices today.

Shouldn't that be something like


It is true that for a certain percentage of users (mainly the younger ones), messaging activities is a primary use of mobile devices today.
There are other uses of mobile devices apart from messaging.

As for the journo's measurement of 'then number of apps downloaded' being important... well IMHO, it is not. I have 9 Apps installed on my iPhone. Apart from one (iWitter) all of them were downloaded and installed the day after I got the phone. App churn isn't everything you know.

Pah!

Well, not necessarily only younger users - but definitely more casual users. And with so many smartphones in use now, the number of casual users is immense and still growing. 

An interesting article. The most important part in my opinion is this underlying narrative of how a lot of businesses and writers are trying to chip away from Apple's business model. 

I agree totally on that part: A lot, probably most, of the doom-and-gloom of the App Store Implosion is complete BS. Apps are doing really well, both conceptually and in practice. And from a user perspective, it's a lot faster to use an app than it is to interact in a potentially time-consuming fashion with fx a chatbot. 

But it's still interesting to exploit that huge number of users who don't download apps. Not by trying to have some convuluted explanation to how the whole app concept is failing - instead we should look at the development in the user base. And I think the explanation is pretty straightforward: The user base of smartphones have grown significantly over the last few years and there are now more "casual" users than ever before, to the point where they are now the majority of users. 

So, which functions of the smartphone do they use? Mostly, the message apps. So a lot of the software tech industry see a chance of a growing market here, and they're right - but the whole narrative of the failing app concept is flawed. The App Store needs modernisation, very true, but that's basically it. 

Which brings us us to these more casual users, who enjoy the messaging apps because they are easy to operate and navigate, they are built to interact with other people in an informal manner, they have an extremely low fail rate and they use very little bandwidth. They also have a lot of downsides, but seen from a more casual perspective, those downsides are acceptable. That's how it looks from fx USA, UK and China. 

But when you look at it from a country like Denmark, the perspective changes somewhat. The chatbots and voice assistants rely heavily on language recognition and understanding. And while the software solutions are build or being build for the larger languages, the smaller ones get left out. Here in Denmark, we got Siri in Danish several years after the release in English. Google's voice search also works in Danish, but stuff like the Amazon Echo, Siri for Apple TV, chatbots in message apps etc. simply do not work in Danish. My guess is that you can say the same for most other minor languages - in fact, the further away you get from major languages and sufficient 1st world countries, the less support there is for these new bots. 

So the ideas for voice assistants and chatbots are great for rich economies with large languages - but for the rest of the world, having app stores allow local developers to code apps aimed for a more limited audience, with the functionality needed and without the coupling to more advanced bots, designed primarily for English or Chinese speaking audiences.