4 ms·

You'd almost think supporting a phone for a longer amount of time might actually be better than trying to sell a new phone every year or two.

by ece 19d ago

rickdeckard 18d ago
Only if you find a way to create revenue beyond the time-of-purchase, to offset the cost of development and maintenance, aka service revenue. So far only Apple achieved this by ensuring a walled garden around their ecosystem, securing additional revenue-share for every single 3rd party app and every transaction of the user. All other vendors are structurally prevented to properly compete in services, and have to rely on Google paying some minor revenue-share on Services, while having only limited control over the user-experience to distinguish themselves...
- ece 18d ago
  This would be a bit convincing if there weren't other hardware and services providers like Fairphone, GrapheneOS and Google themselves, who do support and maintenance for longer.
  - rickdeckard 18d ago
    The fact that you put "Google themselves" in this list makes the conversation moot, because Google is de-facto the service-revenue recipient of the entire Android device-ecosystem and the culprit of the problem.
    - ece 17d ago
      Samsung and Xiaomi have bigger ecosystems than Google in some ways. If they want to fix their development and support for issues like this, they can.
      - rickdeckard 17d ago
        1. Fairphone actually demonstrates that it's not a matter of "want" for sustainable/repairable/longevity, the market still doesn't reward sufficiently for it. --> If the total potential is an increase in sales of 100k units at ~450 USD/device, there is no fiscal justification for a stock-trading company to actually build such a product. That's why e.g. the EU keeps mandating more and more of this, they "artificially" create the need for it because the market doesn't do it itself. 2. They don't have a comparable service revenue-ecosystem to Google, not even remotely. Even in sum across their entire mobile ecosystem, the majority of service-revenue their products generate is actually Google's service revenue of the Android ecosystem, of which they get a miniscule revenue-share via Google's RSA program. The only substantial revenue is still generated at the hardware time-of-sale only, which needs to finance the lifecycle maintenance of the product. So the objective becomes to sell a critical-mass of hardware to sustain the maintenance of the device. And then, the next level: The market-pressure for in-time software-maintenance can only be fulfilled by not deviating too much from Google's baseline (minimizing the effort of upgrading to newer Android versions). Not deviating from Google's baseline means either contributing back any disruptive changes to Google for integration in the baseline or (more likely) to not disrupt the smartphone landscape on platform-level at all. Disrupting with hardware innovation only works either on very-large scale or on small-scale, because either you can contract a component supplier for a huge volume of a component exclusive for you, or you pick a innovative component which cannot be supplied in huge quantity yet (and is therefore out of reach for larger brands) As result, the established players on the smartphone market don't make any more innovative leaps, because the risk/benefit ratio for the ROI is just not there. --> Vendors ship devices based on common hardware available at that time, combined with software available at that time. Chinese vendors changed the game a bit by announcing devices with innovative hardware which then never reached the global market, because the components were not available at-scale yet (under-display camera, wrap-around displays, new battery composition, 5G,...) --> This was a game-changer because e.g. Samsung, Apple, Motorola, LG would not announce a device they knew they can't launch at-scale. Oppo, Xiaomi et al could do a limited run for a device-launch in China, with chinese component-suppliers shipping to assembly-factories in China with low ramp-up costs.
        17d ago

You'd almost think supporting a phone for a longer amount of time might actually be better than trying to sell a new phone every year or two.

by ece 19d ago

You'd almost think supporting a phone for a longer amount of time might actually be better than trying to sell a new phone every year or two.

rickdeckard 18d ago

Only if you find a way to create revenue beyond the time-of-purchase, to offset the cost of development and maintenance, aka service revenue. So far only Apple achieved this by ensuring a walled garden around their ecosystem, securing additional revenue-share for every single 3rd party app and every transaction of the user. All other vendors are structurally prevented to properly compete in services, and have to rely on Google paying some minor revenue-share on Services, while having only limited control over the user-experience to distinguish themselves...

ece 18d ago
This would be a bit convincing if there weren't other hardware and services providers like Fairphone, GrapheneOS and Google themselves, who do support and maintenance for longer.
- rickdeckard 18d ago
  The fact that you put "Google themselves" in this list makes the conversation moot, because Google is de-facto the service-revenue recipient of the entire Android device-ecosystem and the culprit of the problem.
  - ece 17d ago
    Samsung and Xiaomi have bigger ecosystems than Google in some ways. If they want to fix their development and support for issues like this, they can.
    - rickdeckard 17d ago
      1. Fairphone actually demonstrates that it's not a matter of "want" for sustainable/repairable/longevity, the market still doesn't reward sufficiently for it. --> If the total potential is an increase in sales of 100k units at ~450 USD/device, there is no fiscal justification for a stock-trading company to actually build such a product. That's why e.g. the EU keeps mandating more and more of this, they "artificially" create the need for it because the market doesn't do it itself. 2. They don't have a comparable service revenue-ecosystem to Google, not even remotely. Even in sum across their entire mobile ecosystem, the majority of service-revenue their products generate is actually Google's service revenue of the Android ecosystem, of which they get a miniscule revenue-share via Google's RSA program. The only substantial revenue is still generated at the hardware time-of-sale only, which needs to finance the lifecycle maintenance of the product. So the objective becomes to sell a critical-mass of hardware to sustain the maintenance of the device. And then, the next level: The market-pressure for in-time software-maintenance can only be fulfilled by not deviating too much from Google's baseline (minimizing the effort of upgrading to newer Android versions). Not deviating from Google's baseline means either contributing back any disruptive changes to Google for integration in the baseline or (more likely) to not disrupt the smartphone landscape on platform-level at all. Disrupting with hardware innovation only works either on very-large scale or on small-scale, because either you can contract a component supplier for a huge volume of a component exclusive for you, or you pick a innovative component which cannot be supplied in huge quantity yet (and is therefore out of reach for larger brands) As result, the established players on the smartphone market don't make any more innovative leaps, because the risk/benefit ratio for the ROI is just not there. --> Vendors ship devices based on common hardware available at that time, combined with software available at that time. Chinese vendors changed the game a bit by announcing devices with innovative hardware which then never reached the global market, because the components were not available at-scale yet (under-display camera, wrap-around displays, new battery composition, 5G,...) --> This was a game-changer because e.g. Samsung, Apple, Motorola, LG would not announce a device they knew they can't launch at-scale. Oppo, Xiaomi et al could do a limited run for a device-launch in China, with chinese component-suppliers shipping to assembly-factories in China with low ramp-up costs.
      - 17d ago