This advice would work for clothes/home appliances/furniture and other competitive markets, but not to mobile OSes.
Mobile OSes are natural monopoly/duopolies. There isn't enough room in the world for 100 OSes for us to get a competitive market. There isn't even room for 3. There is barely room for 2 with great downside. Companies spend a lot of money developing an app for one OS and basically re-creating it for the other.
I'm looking at my phone's home screen. Most of these apps are available in the other OS too, with almost the exact same functionality, but completely different codebases. Each of these duplicate efforts represent anything from X×100K $ to X×10M $ of development cost. This is just part of the cost of having more OSes. And the consumer ultimately pays for these costs.
Arguably not to OSes in general. Each platform type (desktop, server, mobile) effectively has only a couple of realistic choices when it comes to the OS. The network effects are very strong and winners take all.
Can you back this claim with a source? How do you explain that Android smartphones has grown even more than iOS, despite the fact that they allow you to install whatever apps you choose?
> How do you explain that Android smartphones has grown even more than iOS, despite the fact that they allow you to install whatever apps you choose?
1. Android is free for OEMs, iOS is unavailable. If you want to make a phone then its a great choice, and a free one. 2. Most flavors have a dominant store built in (android store, amazon store, Chinese-oem stores like Xiaomi) that are "safe" or offer that illusion. The important thing here is the built-in-trust of the default settings 3. Piggy-backing off point 1, cheap phone OS means people can make cheap phones -> Cheaper leads to more available for more people, and most of the world is poor compared to US iPhone users
I don’t particularly like it but the "trickle down theory" non marginally applies to fashionable or otherwise luxury items. iPhone creating a desire later satisfied by a cheaper option. Or something like that.
Smartphones have seen explosive growth because normal people can use them safely.