DanielEran

rogifan_new said:

The idea that if you don't buy a "premium" phone means you've got nothing more than a pocket calculator is ridiculous. The goal of tech companies should be to make technology more accessible to people not less. Smartphone prices should be coming down over time not going up. I know a number of people who own an iPhone SE and it's one of their favorite phones ever. It's not a lesser phone to them because they didn't spend $1000 on it.

Not true. "Premium" isn't defined at $1000. For Apple it usually means $600, and in Android land it is around $400. 

But it Android is slipping downhill so rapidly that new sub-premium tiers at $300 and $100 are being talked about by market research groups.

iPhone SE is "premium" compared to Android. 

Soli said:

longpath said:

saltyzip said:

I thought Google also announced an easy way to update android which includes even down to graphics drivers, did I dream that?

Let's see if we actually start to see more than a tiny sliver of Android handsets using the current version of Android. It's not enough to propose an alleged way of defragmenting the platform. It has to work in actual practice, otherwise, I'd say you just dreamed it or it was just more vaporware from Google.

Vendors and/or Google have been getting better. Version 7.x, which was officially released in late-August 2016, is running on 7.1% of handsets, according to Google.

• https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html

Actually it's not getting better. It's getting worse. At the same time last year, Android 6.x had reached a slightly higher 7.5% penetration, and two years ago Android 5.x was well above 9%. 

New, commercially relevant Android is effectively going away, sliding into obscurity. To distract, Google is showing off cool apps (Lens, Assistant) that don't even work across more than a tenth of it's installed base. 

Thats is why Google is bringing those things to iOS, because Apple's platform is modern, functional, growing and healthy. 

Http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/17/05/17/google-io17-android-deployment-rate-continues-to-slip-backward

The base of "really old Android" is actually growing faster, perhaps in part because some devices don't get upgrades yet stick around, but also because new devices continue to ship in large volumes with very outdated software. 

The Android apologists like to focus on flagship new Androids, but those models don't sell in enough quantity to matter. Most Androids are barely functional feature phones aimed at selling for $100.

Low margin exporters don't work to get the most updated software working on their basic hardware for that kind of money. They ship 2-3 year old products, unchanged. That is the majority of Android. 

gatorguy said:

longpath said:

Spot on. Let's wait and see before declaring it failed. Or successful. 

It is useful to recognize a pattern of failure and use that to temper your expectations going forward. 

larrya said:

Rayz2016 said:

seanismorris said:

How about before they spend all the time on new features, they spend 5 minutes removing the 100MB download limit from the Apple App Store.  (Apple requires a wifi connection.  I have unlimited LTE data.)

I can't tell you how stupid it is to still have this tiny limit... Yes, there is a (every changing) workaround but it's incredibly annoying.

Also, I can't install CRITICAL IOS updates with this limit in place, and there is no workaround.  I'm using with Apple (rather than Android) because of the superior security.  Apple's pissing that advantage away.

So if I understand this correctly, you are trying to upgrade an operating system … over a mobile phone network. 

A phone network that isn't really unlimited because when you exceed your limit (it's in the contract you didn't read) , or during periods of network congestion (when everyone on your network is trying to upgrade their OS at once), the connection will be throttled back. That increase the time to install the update and increases the risk that you will lose the connection while files are downloading. 

Oh, come off it.  Throttling occurs at around 20GB, and even a slower connection is better than not doing the upgrade at all if he doesn't have access to WiFi. There's no reason this limit couldn't be doubled or tripled. Why must we be such sycophants that we can't tolerate the smallest valid criticism of Apple? This is a phone, not a religion. 

Not being able to download SW updates over LTE can be frustrating, but consider the massive amount of data involved in every user downloading GB of apps nearly every day, and massive surges of very large OS updates that hit for millions of users within the first few days of release.  

There are likely discussions with carriers that avoid swamping their networks. Apple's approach seems to be working to limit what needs to be downloaded, in initiatives like last year's App Thinning, but carrier networks are not built out to serve unlimited broadband style service for every subscriber at once. 

avon b7 said:

You are completely correct. The article was written to diss Samsung. That's basically the only reason it exists.

The smartphone market has reached saturation point in the developed markets. The days of spectacular year on year growth are virtually gone in the Android world and possibly the iPhone world too. Perhaps the author is unaware of this. The next iPhone may buck the trend a little but unless Apple pushes deeper into the mid tier, beyond the next model, Apple will struggle to see major growth.

Talking of 'peak' Galaxys is pretty much worthless, of course.

The article supports its premise by harking back to a different age in smartphone history when, just like Apple today (in the iOS world), Samsung had no real flagship competition. All that has changed.

Huawei alone snapped up over 100 million users in 2015 and increased that to around 130 million in 2016. A figure that Included around 10 million flagship P9 series phones.

That's just from one manufacturer. In that light, the S8 numbers look very good. The pool of potential buyers is greatly reduced if compared to the same pool that the 'peak' Galaxy fished in. 

What year did Samsung have no flagship competition? 2013, 2014? Stop making up alt-facts. There was more competition and more competitors then than now.