I worked for an iOS developer in Finland this summer; it's an amazing but peculiar country. Some elements that might help make sense of the news: - those numbe

I worked for an iOS developer in Finland this summer; it's an amazing but peculiar country. Some elements that might help make sense of the news: - those numbers are only for DNA: it was the operator that I used, great service; it is a relevant operator on the market, but apparently not the best for international roaming or the countryside; Helsinki coverage makes it a preferred option for the savvy, but not the most senior crowd who travels abroad quite a bit; - the tech scene is extremely tight-knight, sprung out of Nokia; most of those have close ties to some of Jollo developers and have internal information on the project; - the country is not only fairly small, it includes SuperCell, Rovio and that’s the tip of the iceberg: dozen of thousands out of the 600k-1.3M people living in Helsinki or around develop for mobiles; most people openly describe how the country made a conscious, political, country-wide pivot from Nokia’s experience in sparse mobile code to iOS games and apps; half the people there seem to personally know game developers; - iPhones 5C and 5S were not available early this summer and as you can imagine, this was a significant, professionally dire problem (on that note: Seriously, Apple!?); people flew and came back with fistfuls of the things up long after Finnish resellers suffered shortages; I believe that operator subsidies on the handsets are not significant (but I can’t say for sure: as a foreigner, I couldn’t hold a contract myself). Because of that, I’m assuming that operator sales of smartphones are a biased sample; traffic data would be preferable for actual use. However, even that usage is skewed: most people have a mobile platform written in bold on their LinkedIn profile, or ask one who has before buying a handset. That they sold significantly is a great sign however: if the product wasn’t good, local buyers would have heard rumors before — and many people buying are actually considering developing for the thing.