“It’s the apps. The iPhone and Android conquered the world because of the apps,” Larry Seltzer reports for Ars Technica. “More specifically, what keeps Android and iOS dominant is the utter lack of those apps on competing platforms.”
MacDailyNews Take: No. What keeps iOS dominant (94% smartphone profit share) is that with superior hardware, operating system, and total ecosystem, iOS users are extremely satisfied. Android sells because it’s a cheap iPhone knockoff. Not profitable (just 6% and falling of smartphone profit share), cheap. AppLack™ isn’t “holding down” other OSes. Other OSes were very late to the game that Apple invented. The only mobile OS that sells at all is the one that tries the hardest and was the quickest to ape iOS, patents be damned. If Apple hadn’t had such a long exclusivity agreement with AT&T, Android wouldn’t be where it is today in terms of units shipped.
“But today, the mobile landscape is significantly different from a year or two ago (let alone five),” Seltzer reports. “Today, apps aren’t really necessary. In fact, it’s easy to envision an excellent, software-rich mobile device that uses the Web instead of apps.”
“There’s currently a litany of problems with apps. There is the platform lock-in and the space the apps take up on the device. Updating apps is a pain that users often ignore, leaving broken or vulnerable versions in use long after they’ve been allegedly patched,” Seltzer reports. “Apps are also a lot of work for developers—it’s not easy to write native apps to run on both Android and iOS, never mind considering Windows Phone and BlackBerry.”
Seltzer reports, “What’s the alternative? Well, perhaps the best answer is to go back to the future and do what we do on desktop computers: use the Web and the Web browser.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: To app or not to app, that is the question. The answer depends on what you’re trying to do. Sometimes Web apps are the answer, sometimes not.
One thing we don’t want to see are watered down, lowest common denominator apps that ignore the unique benefits iOS provides. So, the answer to the headline is, of course, “No.”