“Apple’s premium pricing strategy has come under criticism for allowing Android competitors continued dominance in terms of unit market share. One argument against Apple’s pricing strategy is that Apple is starting to lose the ecosystem war to Android as Android adds a tremendous number of entry level smartphone users. The premise is that ecosystem value depends on the number of people participating in them, and that Android is going to end up with several times as many users as iOS,” Elephant Analytics writes for Seeking Alpha. “Despite Android’s growth, we maintain that Apple still has the strongest ecosystem and is not at risk of being relegated to second-tier status in the future.”
“While it is true that ecosystem value is dependent on enough people participating in them, iOS already has a tremendous amount of users and is successful enough that doubling market share would not significantly influence app availability,” E.A. writes. “The iPhone platform is the first priority for 35% of developers vs. 27% for Android smartphones. This comes despite Android’s sustained numerical advantage… A key reason why Apple still retains development priority is app profitability. Google Play is doing very well in terms of downloads and total number of apps, beating Apple’s App Store in both of those metrics now. However, the metric that matters most to developers is profitability, and in that area Apple still dominates. This is mainly due to Android’s user numbers being inflated by large numbers of cheap smartphones. People buying cheap smartphones just do not spend very much on apps.”
E.A. writes, “Apple retains developer priority due to higher app profitability as well as a less fragmented OS. There are very few significant apps that are missing from the App Store, while Google Play is still missing a number of top apps. As well, studies indicate that Android has less consumer loyalty than Apple. This means that Apple has a chance to convert very significant numbers of Android users in the future.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote earlier today:
The quality of the customer matters.
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