11 ms·

So he predicts the amount of smartphones to double from 2.5b to 5b, implying that the majority of it will be android phones, but the "Platform wars" are over?

So he predicts the amount of smartphones to double from 2.5b to 5b, implying that the majority of it will be android phones, but the "Platform wars" are over? Nothing is over, even the "browser war" is now back on in full force, I suspect a new operating system (or perhaps windows 10? who knows) will emerge that will challenge both iOS and Android. Why? because something like this always does.

ebbv 10y ago
> Why? because something like this always does. No it doesn't. Nothing has seriously challenged MS-DOS/Windows ownership of the PC space for 25+ years. Macs have always been around but they are separate hardware. MS-DOS/Windows owned the PC space for most of the 80s, all of the 90s, all of the 00s and will continue to own it through the 10s and onward as it slowly decays. Linux arose in the 90s but it never made any kind of serious challenge on the desktop. Now Linux did challenge the existing server OS market, and totally changed that market around. But that was also facilitated by x86 hardware becoming powerful enough to displace the existing hardware as well. Those two things happened together and probably wouldn't have happened any other way. So the statement that "something always does" arise to challenge dominant players just isn't true at all. Sometimes something does, but not remotely "always".
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Also keep in mind the dot-com bust that left a whole lot of second hand x86 hardware floating around. What got Linux a server foothold was the L in LAMP. Never mind that MS have always fought dirty. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish is perhaps the unofficial company motto. Keep in mind that Active Directory is built on top of open protocols like DNS and Kerberos. But with enough MS "quirks" to make interoperability a chore. Similarly, MS Office will happily support other file formats as inputs, but output will always have MS "quirks". On the hardware side you had questionable contracts that meant MS got paid no matter the OS installed, or deep discounts that only applied if companies only shipped Windows pre-installed. Damn it, they basically choked the life out of Netbooks by putting a very stringent license on Windows XP (that until then they had tried to kill off in favor of Vista) that detailed the hardware it could be run on. almost over night the Netbooks turned into carbon copies, where before each company had been playing with their own designs (Intel bringing out a ATOM package deal that fit the license perfectly likely contributed).
tambourine_man 10y ago
Given enough time, sure. Or maybe smartphones will be irrelevant by then. But within the foreseeable future (5-10 years) I doubt it.
- eloisant 10y ago
  I think that's the only way you could displace Android now, by having a paradigm shift so strong that it's a brand new market.
kbart 10y ago
Windows dominated PC market for decades, so why can't Android do the same with smartphones? Not saying that this will be the case, just providing an example to counter your logic.
- ido 10y ago
  I think MS was far more aggressive (some would say, predatory) in maintaining their market domination when the PC was the hot platform of the day ('80s to mid '00s), than Google is now. DOS/Windows (and Office, another brutally fought-for market dominant) was the lifeblood of MS, Google mostly just wants to make sure a lot of people have cheap, always-on, access to the web so they can monetize their searches.
- skoczymroczny 10y ago
  Android has competition in form of iOS. Windows doesn't have any competition with same level of polish. Linux experience is still broken for many people, from the moment of boot (many display changes, flashing loading screens, text messages scrolling on the screen), through broken drivers, hunting online for magic commandline fixes to common problems, ending up with lack of software support for the platform.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    iOS is irrelevant in many countries where the average population can't afford "devices for rich people". Hence why Apple is trying to bride their way into India with their 2nd hand and refurbished devices.
    - simonh 10y ago
      That's true, but why is that a significant problem for Apple? They're already being slammed by some pundits because the iPhone GS 'might' be reducing their average selling price. You others are slamming them for not selling into the ultra low-end. The real question is do they have a viable, long term sustainable business and market presence.
  - IshKebab 10y ago
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
cageface 10y ago
Evans' analyses are insightful but also a bit hyperbolic. He likes to speak in absolutes about nuanced subjects. I guess analysts can't just say "it depends".
CaptSpify 10y ago
I kind of agree. I have no stats for this, but my impression is that neither Android nor iPhone users are really happy with their devices, they just tolerate them. That sounds like a ripe market for a disruptor.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  I can confirm I'm raging on my Android tablet, its OS, apps, lockdown, and fully integrated surveillance. Apple's IOS is worse in most regards.
- argonaut 10y ago
  I'm very happy with my iPhone. I'm certain most iPhone users are happy with theirs.
- Oletros 10y ago
  I'm very happy with my Android devices and I was very happy with my iOS device
- Xiol 10y ago
  Happy with my Android phone. Have an iPhone for work and it's terrible. I honestly don't know why they're so popular. The UI/UX is atrocious.
  - szatkus 10y ago
    I know how you feel. Apple design their UX for majority. I worked on MacOS for a few weeks and it was nightmare. Like someone removed most of features that was useful to me and added a lot of garbage.
  - pmontra 10y ago
    Not sure if it is atrocious but not having a back key in the OS is really a pain in the a... I have to learn how to go back from every single page every time a friend gives me an iPhone to perform some task. Everything else is more or less the same with every new software system: you have to discover how to do things and there is no easy way out of that. Example: I remember I had problems finding how to send SMS on an iPhone in 2012: the owner was driving and I had to answer one.
legulere 10y ago
I doubt anything else will come. You need to invest extremely much to develop something new, something only a multi billion dollar company can do, and then you still have no app ecosystem. And what for? Afterwards you have to compete with Android which device developers get for free.
pjmlp 10y ago
I enjoy coding for WinRT as part of my hobby programming activities and kind of love the technical decisions Microsoft has done by bringing COM+ Runtime back to life. However the way they managed the platform just killed it for mobile handsets, even if the Surface Phone ever happens. They might win on the tablet market, with the convergence of tablets / laptops / Phablets, since Android and iOS still don't offer a competitive replacement for all type of users, e.g. Visual Studio on Surface vs AIDE and Swift Playgrounds. But it isn't clear if that will actually happen. Android with its Java fork (maybe one day they properly support Java Compact Profiles) has become the MS-DOS/Windows of the mobile world. Google is capitalizing on that for Brillo, which is basically Android/Linux with C++ instead of Java and MIT instead of (L)GPL for anything else. As for iOS, there are still many countries where even with a subsidized contract, they are just too expensive when the average salaries are below the 500 euros line. Yes there will always be Tizen, Ubuntu <pick your GNU/Linux fork>, but I don't see they ever managing to build a solid app story to win the hearts of developers and users. Specially in regards to monetization. So this effectively means iOS and Android are the ones that really matter. Just like we have PS and XBox, Mac OS X vs PC (on the desktop), Windows vs UNIX (on server) and so on.
Al-Khwarizmi 10y ago
There is no Pokémon Go for Windows Phone. I think that is the definitive sign that it has definitely lost the war. Before that, there was some hope, but if you lack the most downloaded app of all time and the currently most engaged app by a large margin, it's all lost IMO.
- placebo 10y ago
  You seriously think history books will show how Google and Apple won eternal market domination because of Pokémon Go? Even if it wasn't just another passing craze (and I have every reason to believe it is), one thing you can learn from history is that you can never tell what will change it's course. EDIT: I stand corrected due to having misunderstood that the claim refers specifically to the status of Windows Phone.
  - timClicks 10y ago
    They didn't win because of Pokémon Go, but the lack of Pokémon Go on Windows Phone will certainly be cited as evidence that Windows Phone had lost its relevance by mid 2016
    - eunice 10y ago
      it never had any relevance to lose & pokemon go is just the latest in ~5 years worth of fads to have passed windows phone over
      - macintux 10y ago
        Google bought Android out of fear that Microsoft's dominance in smartphones would lock them out. Its dominance is ancient history, but it was there.
        bitmapbrother 10y ago
        Google was far more concerned about Apple than Microsoft.
simonh 10y ago
Once the market is established, the barriers to entry for a new platform are formidable. Look at the desktop OS market. Today it's dominated by MS Windows and OSX. 10 years ago it was dominated by MS Windows and OSX. 10 years before that it was dominated by MS Windows and MacOS. 10 years before that it was dominated by MS DOS and MacOS. Apple and MS have had the market carved up between them for 30 years. Competitors have come and gone and barely left even a scratch on the market. It's not about the bare OS, it's about the ecosystem. The reason NeXT never took of is that building an ecosystem in an environment dominated by existing ecosystems is almost impossible. But as soon as it was able to infiltrate the Mac ecosystem it took off. Even Microsoft with all it's market power, tools and software businesses and mind share wasn't able to crack back into the mobile market once iOS and Android had got established. The article is right. It really is over. iOS and Android will dominate for at least the next 10 years, and probably the next 20 or even 30 years. The sky's the limit. They'll have to keep working hard and not totally screw up, but even given MS utter debacles with Vista, Win 8 and Win 10 and their awful developer story over the last 10 years they're still dominant on the desktop. Them leaving gaps in the market left space for OSX to grow but no opportunity for a new platform to get traction. That's how powerful an established platform ecosystem is. It has massive market inertia. So why did Symbian, BB, etc die so fast? They weren't platform ecosystems in the same way. You couldn't build a ten billion dollar software and services industry on Symbian or BB or even the old Windows Mobile. Thousands of companies worth aggregate tens of billions live or die on Android and iOS. The same goes for Windows and OSX. A new mobile platform isn't competing just with Apple or Google. It's competing with those thousands of companies worth tens of billions of dollars in each ecosystem. Those are going to be around for a generation, possibly several generations. Imagine going back to 1986 and asking someone who the two software companies dominating the desktop OS market would be in 30 years time. The Mobile market was at the equivalent point in 2010.
- haberdasher 10y ago
  Chromebooks are outselling Macs in the US [1]. There's still competition, new entrants are still possible. 1: http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/19/11711714/chromebooks-outsold-macs-us-idc-figures http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/19/11711714/chromebooks-outso...
erikb 10y ago
Also we are still missing the "Linux" of Smartphone OSes. It may take another few decades for that to come forth, but there is always a large enough user base that is interested in a truly open operating system, which is neither of the existing two. Maybe the Ubuntu Mobile attempt can get there.
- simonh 10y ago
  Android runs on Linux? I'm not being facetious. AOSP is a fully open source stack that any handset maker can use, Cyanogen is as open a fully-baked distro equivalent as you could want.
  - erikb 10y ago
    There is a difference between having a linux underneath and Being The "Linux" of xyz. Android is not open and doesn't allow you full system control or full insight into all their source code. At least the last time I checked.
    - simonh 10y ago
      AOSP does and Cyanogen is based on AOSP. Arguably AOSP is a separate platform from full license Android and it's AOSP that is experiencing the ballooning growth in the ultra-low-end markets, but it's universally counted into Android adoption and sales figures by everyone that publishes those.
      - erikb 10y ago
        I'll check that out. Thanks!
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    The fact that Android makes use of Linux as a kernel is hardly visible to most developers. The user space is fully Java based and the NDK is so constrained that you can hardly see any difference from another POSIX compatible kernel. And they don't even support a full UNIX SYSTEM V compilant API (e.g. no IPC calls) Now with Android 7, any NDK library that tries to link directly to non-official shared objects will get killed by the dynamic linker. So yeah, Android has Linux as kernel, but they can change it at any moment and only the OEMs writing device drivers would notice the change.
cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
You should at least give a few examples of "because something like this always does", because I can't really think of any example where a new entrant becomes #1 in a market with a clear winner complete with network effects.
- ardacinar 10y ago
  Google Chrome? Although the market effects are very debatable in web browsers.
bitmapbrother 10y ago
>Nothing is over, even the "browser war" is now back on in full force, I suspect a new operating system (or perhaps windows 10? who knows) will emerge that will challenge both iOS and Android. Why? because something like this always does. So you think another OS will come along to challenge Android and iOS and your argument solely consists of "something like this always does"? No it doesn't. Just like nothing has come along to ever challenge the current desktop duopoly.

ebbv 10y ago

> Why? because something like this always does. No it doesn't. Nothing has seriously challenged MS-DOS/Windows ownership of the PC space for 25+ years. Macs have always been around but they are separate hardware. MS-DOS/Windows owned the PC space for most of the 80s, all of the 90s, all of the 00s and will continue to own it through the 10s and onward as it slowly decays. Linux arose in the 90s but it never made any kind of serious challenge on the desktop. Now Linux did challenge the existing server OS market, and totally changed that market around. But that was also facilitated by x86 hardware becoming powerful enough to displace the existing hardware as well. Those two things happened together and probably wouldn't have happened any other way. So the statement that "something always does" arise to challenge dominant players just isn't true at all. Sometimes something does, but not remotely "always".

digi_owl 10y ago
Also keep in mind the dot-com bust that left a whole lot of second hand x86 hardware floating around. What got Linux a server foothold was the L in LAMP. Never mind that MS have always fought dirty. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish is perhaps the unofficial company motto. Keep in mind that Active Directory is built on top of open protocols like DNS and Kerberos. But with enough MS "quirks" to make interoperability a chore. Similarly, MS Office will happily support other file formats as inputs, but output will always have MS "quirks". On the hardware side you had questionable contracts that meant MS got paid no matter the OS installed, or deep discounts that only applied if companies only shipped Windows pre-installed. Damn it, they basically choked the life out of Netbooks by putting a very stringent license on Windows XP (that until then they had tried to kill off in favor of Vista) that detailed the hardware it could be run on. almost over night the Netbooks turned into carbon copies, where before each company had been playing with their own designs (Intel bringing out a ATOM package deal that fit the license perfectly likely contributed).

tambourine_man 10y ago

Given enough time, sure. Or maybe smartphones will be irrelevant by then. But within the foreseeable future (5-10 years) I doubt it.

eloisant 10y ago
I think that's the only way you could displace Android now, by having a paradigm shift so strong that it's a brand new market.

kbart 10y ago

Windows dominated PC market for decades, so why can't Android do the same with smartphones? Not saying that this will be the case, just providing an example to counter your logic.

ido 10y ago
I think MS was far more aggressive (some would say, predatory) in maintaining their market domination when the PC was the hot platform of the day ('80s to mid '00s), than Google is now. DOS/Windows (and Office, another brutally fought-for market dominant) was the lifeblood of MS, Google mostly just wants to make sure a lot of people have cheap, always-on, access to the web so they can monetize their searches.
skoczymroczny 10y ago
Android has competition in form of iOS. Windows doesn't have any competition with same level of polish. Linux experience is still broken for many people, from the moment of boot (many display changes, flashing loading screens, text messages scrolling on the screen), through broken drivers, hunting online for magic commandline fixes to common problems, ending up with lack of software support for the platform.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  iOS is irrelevant in many countries where the average population can't afford "devices for rich people". Hence why Apple is trying to bride their way into India with their 2nd hand and refurbished devices.
  - simonh 10y ago
    That's true, but why is that a significant problem for Apple? They're already being slammed by some pundits because the iPhone GS 'might' be reducing their average selling price. You others are slamming them for not selling into the ultra low-end. The real question is do they have a viable, long term sustainable business and market presence.
- IshKebab 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

cageface 10y ago

Evans' analyses are insightful but also a bit hyperbolic. He likes to speak in absolutes about nuanced subjects. I guess analysts can't just say "it depends".

CaptSpify 10y ago

I kind of agree. I have no stats for this, but my impression is that neither Android nor iPhone users are really happy with their devices, they just tolerate them. That sounds like a ripe market for a disruptor.

dredmorbius 10y ago
I can confirm I'm raging on my Android tablet, its OS, apps, lockdown, and fully integrated surveillance. Apple's IOS is worse in most regards.
argonaut 10y ago
I'm very happy with my iPhone. I'm certain most iPhone users are happy with theirs.
Oletros 10y ago
I'm very happy with my Android devices and I was very happy with my iOS device
Xiol 10y ago
Happy with my Android phone. Have an iPhone for work and it's terrible. I honestly don't know why they're so popular. The UI/UX is atrocious.
- szatkus 10y ago
  I know how you feel. Apple design their UX for majority. I worked on MacOS for a few weeks and it was nightmare. Like someone removed most of features that was useful to me and added a lot of garbage.
- pmontra 10y ago
  Not sure if it is atrocious but not having a back key in the OS is really a pain in the a... I have to learn how to go back from every single page every time a friend gives me an iPhone to perform some task. Everything else is more or less the same with every new software system: you have to discover how to do things and there is no easy way out of that. Example: I remember I had problems finding how to send SMS on an iPhone in 2012: the owner was driving and I had to answer one.

legulere 10y ago

I doubt anything else will come. You need to invest extremely much to develop something new, something only a multi billion dollar company can do, and then you still have no app ecosystem. And what for? Afterwards you have to compete with Android which device developers get for free.

pjmlp 10y ago

I enjoy coding for WinRT as part of my hobby programming activities and kind of love the technical decisions Microsoft has done by bringing COM+ Runtime back to life. However the way they managed the platform just killed it for mobile handsets, even if the Surface Phone ever happens. They might win on the tablet market, with the convergence of tablets / laptops / Phablets, since Android and iOS still don't offer a competitive replacement for all type of users, e.g. Visual Studio on Surface vs AIDE and Swift Playgrounds. But it isn't clear if that will actually happen. Android with its Java fork (maybe one day they properly support Java Compact Profiles) has become the MS-DOS/Windows of the mobile world. Google is capitalizing on that for Brillo, which is basically Android/Linux with C++ instead of Java and MIT instead of (L)GPL for anything else. As for iOS, there are still many countries where even with a subsidized contract, they are just too expensive when the average salaries are below the 500 euros line. Yes there will always be Tizen, Ubuntu <pick your GNU/Linux fork>, but I don't see they ever managing to build a solid app story to win the hearts of developers and users. Specially in regards to monetization. So this effectively means iOS and Android are the ones that really matter. Just like we have PS and XBox, Mac OS X vs PC (on the desktop), Windows vs UNIX (on server) and so on.

Al-Khwarizmi 10y ago

There is no Pokémon Go for Windows Phone. I think that is the definitive sign that it has definitely lost the war. Before that, there was some hope, but if you lack the most downloaded app of all time and the currently most engaged app by a large margin, it's all lost IMO.

placebo 10y ago
You seriously think history books will show how Google and Apple won eternal market domination because of Pokémon Go? Even if it wasn't just another passing craze (and I have every reason to believe it is), one thing you can learn from history is that you can never tell what will change it's course. EDIT: I stand corrected due to having misunderstood that the claim refers specifically to the status of Windows Phone.
- timClicks 10y ago
  They didn't win because of Pokémon Go, but the lack of Pokémon Go on Windows Phone will certainly be cited as evidence that Windows Phone had lost its relevance by mid 2016
  - eunice 10y ago
    it never had any relevance to lose & pokemon go is just the latest in ~5 years worth of fads to have passed windows phone over
    - macintux 10y ago
      Google bought Android out of fear that Microsoft's dominance in smartphones would lock them out. Its dominance is ancient history, but it was there.
      - bitmapbrother 10y ago
        Google was far more concerned about Apple than Microsoft.

simonh 10y ago

Once the market is established, the barriers to entry for a new platform are formidable. Look at the desktop OS market. Today it's dominated by MS Windows and OSX. 10 years ago it was dominated by MS Windows and OSX. 10 years before that it was dominated by MS Windows and MacOS. 10 years before that it was dominated by MS DOS and MacOS. Apple and MS have had the market carved up between them for 30 years. Competitors have come and gone and barely left even a scratch on the market. It's not about the bare OS, it's about the ecosystem. The reason NeXT never took of is that building an ecosystem in an environment dominated by existing ecosystems is almost impossible. But as soon as it was able to infiltrate the Mac ecosystem it took off. Even Microsoft with all it's market power, tools and software businesses and mind share wasn't able to crack back into the mobile market once iOS and Android had got established. The article is right. It really is over. iOS and Android will dominate for at least the next 10 years, and probably the next 20 or even 30 years. The sky's the limit. They'll have to keep working hard and not totally screw up, but even given MS utter debacles with Vista, Win 8 and Win 10 and their awful developer story over the last 10 years they're still dominant on the desktop. Them leaving gaps in the market left space for OSX to grow but no opportunity for a new platform to get traction. That's how powerful an established platform ecosystem is. It has massive market inertia. So why did Symbian, BB, etc die so fast? They weren't platform ecosystems in the same way. You couldn't build a ten billion dollar software and services industry on Symbian or BB or even the old Windows Mobile. Thousands of companies worth aggregate tens of billions live or die on Android and iOS. The same goes for Windows and OSX. A new mobile platform isn't competing just with Apple or Google. It's competing with those thousands of companies worth tens of billions of dollars in each ecosystem. Those are going to be around for a generation, possibly several generations. Imagine going back to 1986 and asking someone who the two software companies dominating the desktop OS market would be in 30 years time. The Mobile market was at the equivalent point in 2010.

haberdasher 10y ago
Chromebooks are outselling Macs in the US [1]. There's still competition, new entrants are still possible. 1: http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/19/11711714/chromebooks-outsold-macs-us-idc-figures http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/19/11711714/chromebooks-outso...

erikb 10y ago

Also we are still missing the "Linux" of Smartphone OSes. It may take another few decades for that to come forth, but there is always a large enough user base that is interested in a truly open operating system, which is neither of the existing two. Maybe the Ubuntu Mobile attempt can get there.

simonh 10y ago
Android runs on Linux? I'm not being facetious. AOSP is a fully open source stack that any handset maker can use, Cyanogen is as open a fully-baked distro equivalent as you could want.
- erikb 10y ago
  There is a difference between having a linux underneath and Being The "Linux" of xyz. Android is not open and doesn't allow you full system control or full insight into all their source code. At least the last time I checked.
  - simonh 10y ago
    AOSP does and Cyanogen is based on AOSP. Arguably AOSP is a separate platform from full license Android and it's AOSP that is experiencing the ballooning growth in the ultra-low-end markets, but it's universally counted into Android adoption and sales figures by everyone that publishes those.
    - erikb 10y ago
      I'll check that out. Thanks!
- pjmlp 10y ago
  The fact that Android makes use of Linux as a kernel is hardly visible to most developers. The user space is fully Java based and the NDK is so constrained that you can hardly see any difference from another POSIX compatible kernel. And they don't even support a full UNIX SYSTEM V compilant API (e.g. no IPC calls) Now with Android 7, any NDK library that tries to link directly to non-official shared objects will get killed by the dynamic linker. So yeah, Android has Linux as kernel, but they can change it at any moment and only the OEMs writing device drivers would notice the change.

cocktailpeanuts 10y ago

You should at least give a few examples of "because something like this always does", because I can't really think of any example where a new entrant becomes #1 in a market with a clear winner complete with network effects.

ardacinar 10y ago
Google Chrome? Although the market effects are very debatable in web browsers.

bitmapbrother 10y ago

>Nothing is over, even the "browser war" is now back on in full force, I suspect a new operating system (or perhaps windows 10? who knows) will emerge that will challenge both iOS and Android. Why? because something like this always does. So you think another OS will come along to challenge Android and iOS and your argument solely consists of "something like this always does"? No it doesn't. Just like nothing has come along to ever challenge the current desktop duopoly.