TL;DR: Apple dominates the US smartphone market, but EU regulations may offer Android a chance for resurgence by enforcing messaging interoperability and standardizing hardware features.
This is so funny for someone from Europe. Nobody I know cares what phone you have.
And everyone is using chat apps, mostly WhatsApp or signal, so everybody has the same great chatting experience.
Said like someone who can’t afford an iPhone…
Just kidding, I use Samsung myself. It’s crazy how easy it is to brainwash Americans into worshiping their corporate gods. Couple of good ads and they will die for their brand or choice.
My wife was bullied into getting an iPhone because of her colleagues, and they were buy one get one free, so now I have one too.
It’s a phone, I’m happy
buy one get one free
Still got scammed, arguably lmao
People get so hostile over such things. I have an iPhone for business. I have a Pixel for my personal use. They’re alright. It depends on what you need. Still a smartphone enthusiast.
Ugh, sounds like some of my coworkers and MacBooks. Then you discover that MacBooks are seriously crippled compared to the Linux machine you were using and you get told one of:
- “What do you mean by $feature? I’ve never heard of that.”
- “Why would you want to do that?”
- Run a badly performing Linux VM in a janky hypervisor to do that
- Pay $10 for this little 3rd party app to fix the problem
Throw in some serious RSI pain from that tire fire of a keyboard and yeah, I have no idea why I switched.
Edit: Work machine. No way I’d pay for Apple with my own money.
Americans are all about status symbols and knowing names. Runs in our eagle screeching capitalist blood.
It’s rough in the US. Most iPhone users will insist that iMessage is better and refuse to use anything else, and then whine when an android user is in a group chat and none of the features work.
I have several group chats with both android & iPhone users. No one complains. The only place I hear about people complaining is the Internet, never anyone in the wild.
Yes. Everybody and their grandma in Spain (at least) is using WhatsApp.
Thank you. Based EU citizens genuinely carrying the US on this issue, and we are looking forward to removable batteries.
Some modern phones still have removable batteries, like my Motorola e5 play, its quite useful if the phone locks up bad, I can pop the battery out to restart it.
Yeah same here
UK. I’ll get the odd joke from an iPhone user but we all use WhatsApp and no one really cares.
Try to use something that’s something other than iOS or Android with Google services.
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The statement about a massive majority of iPhones in the Nordics is factually incorrect.
iPhone has a slight lead at one of the biggest vendors Komplett, but that is without counting the remaining 10 % which is almost exclusively Android units.
For clarity: Komplett operates in all the Nordic countries, but I would assume these numbers are for Norway, the richest of the bunch.It’s the same story at work where I am the responsible party for company phones: Pretty evenly distributed where some of the iPhones are chosen due to MLM solutions for those wishing certain solutions.
I can only speak for my own age group in my personal life, but I would say Android has a quite big lead with young adults.
Kids/teens might be a completely different story though.
This is such a weird headline. I’m not switching to Apple and know tons of people who also would never do that. Most people don’t care about blue vs. green chat bubbles, except for those who just use their iPhone as a status symbol.
Sure, messaging needs to get fixed, and I hope the EU pushes Apple towards open standards. But it’s not like there aren’t a ton of android manufacturers who are making money hand over fist on devices.
How old are you? A lot of this is a youth phenomenon. Shit I was out of college before the internet existed. I can’t possibly relate to 13 and 14yo kids getting their first phones now. Maybe they do care about the green bubble.
Yeah even among younger millennials, the green bubble is a big deal. It’s not the color of the bubble, it’s the ability to use more advanced chat functions like reactions, and if any phone in an iMessage group is Android, it breaks the functionality for the entire group.
I’ve always had an android phone and I’ve had to deal with shade from Apple sheeple regarding group messages on many occasions.
Look at the iMessage saga; Apple insists on treating Android owners like second-class citizens in group texts. Android owners can’t enjoy many modern messaging features with iPhone owners, such as high-quality media sharing, read receipts, and more.
Are WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Signal, and such blocked in the US? What’s with that whining about iMessage?
Are WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Signal, and such blocked in the US?
Of course they’re not blocked.
People just default to the app that comes pre-installed with their phone and sits right there on the first screen, because it’s marginally easier than picking a third party app in the App Store, installing it, and creating an account.
It’s the exact same argument that Microsoft made when they bundled Internet Explorer with their OS.
People just default to the app that comes pre-installed with their phone
Cannot confirm this is the case with messaging apps in the EU. Nobody uses iMessage and nobody uses whatever the current Google thing is each year. WhatsApp is dominat despite not being preinstalled on any major phone brand (certainly not Samsung and Apple).
Apples to oranges.
The reason is that messaging services like WhatsApp became popular in Europe because carriers charged exorbitant fees for SMS messaging at a time when no single phone manufacturer absolutely dominated the market. Apps like WhatsApp made it possible to communicate with people, no matter which specific phone or brand or platform they were using.
If the iPhone (with iMessage pre-installed) had been the dominant smartphone and ecosystem at the time, chances are that what’s happening in the US would have happened in Europe in exactly the same way.
It’s exactly the same argument as with Windows and Internet Explorer: if Windows had been one podunk operating system out of many, nobody would have cared. The whole issue was that Microsoft used the market dominance of Windows to quasi-lock users into Internet Explorer.
I tried to use the Google chat apps. There were some nice ones. ( still missing allo). But they changed too often, so now no Google chat app anymore.
It’s not that I’m unable to install an app on my phone and learn how to use it, it’s that I’m unable to convince every person I know to install that app, then teach them all how to use it.
100% of iPhone users have iMessage. And they can use the same app to talk to 100% of their contacts.
Fragmentation is a huge problem for everything else. What percentage of Android users have any particular one of those apps you listed?
I only grudgingly install WhatsApp when I travel to Europe. Discordv and Slack are not really competitors in this space (though I’m sure there’s a small subset of users who use them that way). I have Signal and Telegram and yet I still use SMS with most of my contacts because that’s the only one that is guaranteed to work.
I’ve tried getting my friends onto Signal, with some amount of success. But many have eventually stopped using it because I was the only one they used it with. A couple of my iPhone-using family members reported that they stopped getting notifications from Signal because they used it so infrequently that iOS basically disabled it (I guess it does that after a month of disuse but I’m not sure exactly).
It’s a losing battle. We’ve fallen back to SMS.
Fragmentation is a huge problem for everything else. What percentage of Android users have any particular one of those apps you listed?
WhatApp is installed on little bit under 100% among all Android phones and iPhones in most EU countries and should the EU actually tackle messenger interoperability, iMessage is definitively not the main target. The most die-hard Apple fans I know use iMessage for a little bit when new features were introduced. Then they go back to WhatsApp like everybody else.
To be clear: I’m not an advocate of WhatApp here, I’m merely explaining that the EU does not care at all about Apple’s chat service nobody in the EU uses. Should any legislation even affect iMessage, it’ll be more coincidental, not targeted at it.
I don’t know about the rest of the world but in the UK text messages used to cost 10p for each one you send. Multimedia messages were like 40p. Really expensive. WhatsApp came about and made both of these free. The rest is history.
Ironically, SMS are generally free these days but nobody obviously uses them. My SMS app is just full of OTP codes being sent to me.
This seems to have happened in most of the world. The US still sticks to SMS because it is free since before chat apps became a thing. SMS was a terrible experience because you would pay per message thanks to carriers’ greed. It didn’t keep up with the demand for constant communication.
Nowadays in Brazil SMS is also free, but by the point they did that, WhatsApp had already become ubiquitous, and had much better features such as sending location, consistent experience with features over different devices, group chats with moderation, voice messages, free voice calls to any user over the world, etc., besides being built from scratch as an SMS substitute (would simply use your mobile number). No one would willingly go back to SMS.
Seems like only some Asian countries defaulted to a different app such as Kakao Talk.
There was Kik Messenger back then but it was more like an anonymous chat app.
You’re from Brazil? I just want to say, if English is not your native language you’d have a hard time convincing me it isn’t.
SMS is the same in the UK these days. Free. MMS isn’t though. They still like to scam the older users who know no better.
A couple of my iPhone-using family members reported that they stopped getting notifications from Signal because they used it so infrequently that iOS basically disabled it
THE BEST OS ever /s
It’s sad and I don’t have it but here in Europe Whatsapp doesn’t seem far from 100%!
It’s so dumb. I have the same problem. I have an iPhone and I try to get them to use Signal, but they just keep using SMS and we keep getting garbage video being sent over group text since some of the group uses Android. When I complain they start putting stuff in Google Photo Albums instead of just using a decent messenger.
such as high-quality media sharing, read receipts, and more.
Who tf wants read receipts? The first thing I do on a new phone is make sure that shit is turned off.
If you think Apple will implement these changes outside the E.U. you gotta be insane.
Also with the news that Qualcomm is hiking prices again, Samsung releasing their least ambitious Smartphone lineup ever this year, Oneplus annihalting their core audience, Huawei being banned, Xiaomi releasing the most confusing product stack imaginable, and Google taking another year off on adding meaningfull features to Android, is this really surprising?
Yeah, what a shame Android is not adding meaningful features like… checks notes… https://www.wired.com/story/apple-iphone-ios-17-ipados-17-new-features/ stickers, contact posters, some updated apps and… showing time. My god, the things I miss on Android!
No, there are definitly things that iOS has that are lacking on Android. Same is true the other way around of course. For example, Spotlight Search on iOS is awesome, Automations are a neat tool to have, Focus Modes - not something for me - but cool for those who want it, Lockscreen customization is really good now on iOS, Backups work way better, Idle battery drain - much better on iOS…
Idle battery drain, the bane of Android’s existence. Remember when Google started to literally sleep components based on gyroscope movement data to try to save battery? And forevermore Android users were forced to deal with a phone that won’t get notifications until after you pick it up?
The problem with Android has always been the hardware integration. The sleep problem is just one symptom of a larger integration problem that spans across media standards, availability of hardware features, subpar drivers etc.
Android still suffers from many apps being designed to work on background (which works on pure Android on the emulator), but being killed depending on the manufacturer running the OS, which require tech savvy users to fix them by tweaking obscure configurations.
Android is what happens when you have a technical engineer idealizing features instead of a product person thinking about the end user first. All the problems from Android seems to be a lack of effort to standardize things or to think how that feature will impact users experience of that product.
The fact most manufactures just care about selling the device and not support it after creates a perverse incentive to fool users with bad features as long as they look good on ads.
@ExLisper @aluminium Android and iOS have been intercalating featureful and polishing updates with each other for a while now.
Yes because I didn’t know about any of this
If you think Apple will implement these changes outside the E.U. you gotta be insane.
I’m interested in the logistics of this. I’m an EU citizen, I prefer using Signal for my messaging, but I do my share of Whatsapp with some people. What the EU mandates is that Apple provides an open API for everyone else to implement sending messages with to iMessage. So as an EU citizen, I will need to be able to use the API to send messages to other EU citizens. Will I be also able to send messages to people outside of the EU or will the API just say that’s not permitted? Does that infringe on my rights as an EU citizen? If it does, and I need to be permitted, will a group chat for example stop working as I leave if I’m the only European?
I mean, maybe google should stop shooting themselves in the foot when it comes to messaging. See: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-of-instability-the-history-of-google-messaging-apps/
I don’t think it’s that important who makes the messenger. Most people outside the US use messengers like WhatsApp anyway.
It’s more about rcs compatibility, which to be fair google was really late to the party bringing it around.
Apple dominates? They have just over 50% of a carrier driven market. That’s not domination.
one single company have over 50% market share? thats domination in my book
I mean, that’s not a huge amount more than androids market share. And that’s just the US, worldwide android has something like 70% market share. As long as it’s dominating worldwide, it’s not gonna die out in the US.
iPhone also has over 50% market share in Japan, Canada, Denmark, Norway, Australia and more. Currently it doesn’t have 50% market share worldwide. But in more countries it is gaining market share.
A quick search says Amazon is 37% of online commerce (depending on which sketchy result you want to trust enough for a Lemmy thread).
If Amazon is problematic, then Apple is a serious issue.
Like 90% of the under-20 market…
Only the EU can save Android in the US now
That sounds a little melodramatic. Apple has a slightly higher marketshare in the US, and that’s the case in few places:
Google has fallen second place to Apple in the Android vs. iPhone war for the first time in over a decade.
From a global perspective, Apple’s dominance is an outlier. The US, Canada and Japan are the only countries where Apple has an edge over Android. Everywhere else Android leads, usually by a wide margin.
And, I gotta say:
But this has also brought a rising tide of elitism, as some US iPhone owners perceive Android as cheaper and inferior.
I think that maybe, the point where one’s favored platform has slightly under 50% marketshare in an – admittedly large – country is maybe just a bit premature to start wallowing in victimhood.
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/21/
It doesn’t help Android OEMs that Apple makes it exceptionally difficult to leave its ecosystem or switch between platforms. For starters, the company’s services are either exclusive to its platforms (iMessage) or woefully underbaked on Android (see Apple TV Plus and Facetime)
iOS is more of a walled garden, that’s true, but Google is not entirely innocent here either.
Look, android lost the lead in market share, but it’s still a huge part of the market. It’s not dying off for years to come, if it even does.
It will if google shitposts a bit harder
At work it was like… Most software developers had android devices, and then business and management had iPhones.
It’s literally a poor financial decision to get an iPhone in the US. Flagship pricing on Android phones in the US is so fucking low you can get an S23 for like $300 on a $20 4 month contract.
_Oh no! Android only made trillions of dollars last year! How oh how will it ever survive!?!!?!_
Am I really supposed to take an opinion like that seriously?
