If you ask many iPhone users why they use an iPhone rather than an Android. They would tell you iMessage first.
Many iPhone users won’t even consider an Android, only because of iMessage and no other reason.
I'm glad because I use android also.
Likewise if you ask many iPhone users they won't tell you iMessage first.
That's the magic and wonder of meaningless anecdotes.
In Europe, where less than half of all people (across social strata) use iPhones/iOS, this simply doesn't fly, so there is no "green bubble problem".
wat?
iPhone costs as much as an equivalent Android (and has for some time), and since you can get it with your phone subscription for a rather low monthly payment, it hasn't been a status symbol for a decade or more.
Only flagships, But decent Androids can be had for much less than an iPhone. Like the Samsung A54 for example. Apple doesn't have ~300 Euro phones with OLED screens in its offer.
[1] https://www.tre.se/handla/mobiltelefoner/apple/iphone-15
But they very much are a status symbol in less developed countries with lower wages: Eastern Europe, Latin America, etc. Lower and middle class people there will save for over a year just to get the latest iPhone, which is why there's a huge market there for clones.
Even in Eastern Europe it's much less of a status symbol than let's say 10 years ago: installment plans are much more affordable to a larger part of the population. Source: am from Eastern Europe (though I live in Sweden now).
> Lower and middle class people there will save for over a year just to get the latest iPhone
Yup, because the poor unwashed masses don't have discounts, instalment plans or phones included with subscriptions. Oh wait, they do.
I can't keep up with goalposts moving speed in this conversation
Sure they do, the iPhone 12 is still widely available and it’s at least twice as fast as an A54.
The prestige argument just hold up when you look at the data unless you scope it to say flagships. Google and Samsung charge just as much, and they have the same decreasingly small prestige that conveys. We’re 15 years into the touchscreen era so you’re just not impressing anyone.
The iPhone 12 doesn't cost 300 Euros, it's 500 Euros and only comes with a dinky 64GB RAM base vs 128GB on the cheaper Samsung.
Here’s your “€300” A54 at €430:
https://www.worten.pt/produtos/smartphone-samsung-galaxy-a54...
Here’s the iPhone 12 at €550:
https://www.worten.pt/produtos/iphone-12-apple-6-1-64-gb-pre...
Now, maybe that extra hundred euros is really critical to you but on the other hand the iPhone will have a service life years longer (it’s over twice as fast), but also neither of these is in a price range where you’re moving into prestige territory. This is like arguing Toyota vs. VW in an alternate universe where Mercedes and Bentley don’t exist. Phones are an impressively flat market in that regard: Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai have the same phones as millions of people who earn many orders of magnitude less than either of them.
>neither of these is in a price range where you’re moving into prestige territory.
It's not about prestige territory, but a stricker price difference of 200 Euros can sway purchase decisions in Europe when a wage is ~2000 Euros.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.ADJ.NNTY.PC.CD?locat...
I assumed you meant yearly because the idea that someone would be able to afford a €400 phone but not a €500 phone just doesn’t make sense when you’re talking about monthly income. Someone making €2k monthly is looking at less 1% of their annual income difference for a device they’ll buy once or twice per decade. It’s a noticeable amount of money, sure, but I’d be quite surprised if that was the area they’d feel a priority to economize.
The Android ecosystem didn't have a $399 Android device in 2016 that is still getting first party security updates today.
The 2016 iPhone SE has worked out to ~$50 per supported year.
They do care about stuff the can actually see, like having big bright high resolution OLLED display, not that dim low-res display on the SE pulled straight out of a 2008 parts bin.
Especially that phones are now the main computing and content consumption platforms for most people. and if you put a 6.2 inch 1000 nits 1080p OLED vs 4.7 inch 720p 400 nits IPS, the difference will be as big as the grand canion and sway purchasing decisions way more than years of SW updates.
Non techie folks care when their insecure phone allows something as important as their bank account to be hacked.
The original Google Pixel also came out in 2016, and was completely dropped from support at the end of 2019.
How many times are we gonna play this boogieman card? As if everyone gets their bank account instantly emptied by hackers the moment their Android is a day out of it's support window.
How many times has that actually happened to users of older un-updated Androids in the real world, documented? I know about over half a dozen people with out of date Androids and they seem to still be solvent with their banks accounts intact. One of them is me.
Hackers in the real world wanting to steal your savings are more likely to use phishing to get you to hand over your banking credentials voluntarily, rather than to build some elaborate malware targeting some unpatched flaw in your phone's OS to steal your banking credentials. Not that the latter isn't a risk, but it's being blown way out of proportion.
>The original Google Pixel also came out in 2016, and was completely dropped from support at the end of 2019.
We're talking here about buying modern phones today, not buying phones from the past. Google and Samsung did a 180 recently where they promise 7 years of updates to their lates phones. What argument are you gonna use 6 years from when those phones will still get updates?
If text comprehension is challenging for you might I suggest using a LLM to summarize things and extract the bullet points.
No, they care when apps stop allowing them to watch DRMed content or they can’t get the latest version anymore because it requires a newer API version. They also care that Android apps cost more to develop because the developers have to avoid using newer APIs or spend more time on QA testing multiple versions. I’ve seen that enough times to know it’s a real problem, and it’s WAY more frustrating to the average person to learn that the phone they “just” bought is no longer supported. This is especially true for older users who are used to keeping a PC for a decade.
And what's the cutoff point for that on Android? I have an Android 9 phone I keep around for tinkering and every ap I need still works just fine.
> to learn that the phone they “just” bought is no longer supported.
In which universe your Android you just bough becomes outdated? Unless you got a time machine and went and Just bough an Android from 2016.
The real one? I know multiple people who paid decent money ($2-300) for phones they saw on sale while shopping, not realizing that they were close to the end of the manufacturer’s run and about to stop getting updates. I used to have a Lenovo tablet which never saw an update to the version of Android released a couple months before the hardware shipped, and stopped getting updates within a year.
I know about this because things like banking apps started nagging them and they asked me for help. Transferring to a new device is scary for a lot of people so this is not a great experience all around.
Another big step function was when security standards started dropping TLS 1.0 or 1.1 and so people who’d been using older devices started getting errors from things they’d been using for years. That’s a bit old by now, but this is still an issue for users of some assistive devices and “smart” appliances which aren’t easy to replace, and is representative of the problems you can hit with an unresponsive vendor and outside services changing due to factors outside of the user’s control - you might scoff and say “that’s so old, who cares?” but that blind person with a Braille display which costs a grand or two to replace probably feels differently.
Please stop dramatizing things with poor examples that are at best anecdotal. But let's say anecdotally, you do buy an old Android phone today by accident, something that gets no updates, something on Android 11 that >3 years old that some shop still has in stock for some reason. All banking apps will still work on Android 11 today and most likely will well into the future. So will Netflix. You're probably thinking of the days of Android KitKat or Jelly bean. In no way buying an older Android today will mean your popular apps will immediately stop working due to APIs getting deprecated. Things don't get deprecated so quickly as you imagine anymore.
I've had phones that hadn't received OEM updates in a half-decade but still ran Netflix just fine. Quite literally, the only thing you're describing right here is the TLS cutoff which also exists for Apple devices.
This is not (anymore) how people buy their phones in many countries. Even on relatively expensive post-paid plans in some European countries, you don't get a discounted phone anymore: All they offer is an interest-free installment plan.
> iPhone costs as much as an equivalent Android
What's an equivalent iPhone to e.g. a Galaxy A54 (~1 year old, EUR ~300-350)?
The iPhone SE (2022) is twice as old and starts at EUR 500.
Apple offers the ability to buy the iPhone with $0 down over (IIRC) 24 months—making that iPhone SE cost ~$21/month.
It has nothing to do with the contract discounts that phone providers used to offer.
It has a lot to do with that. Many US providers offer significant discounts on iPhones when buying them on a (new or renewed) contract. This was a very commonplace thing in Europe as well, but I believe it's become less common.
Installment payments change nothing about the base price.
But they still make it much more accessible to buy an iPhone for someone who doesn't have €500 or $1000 or whatever at one time to comfortably spend on one.
The idea that iPhones could be a meaningful "status symbol" by this point in their lifetime, given all the ways one can obtain one cheaply if that is what one wants, and the percentage of people who own them, just doesn't hold up under scrutiny. It's a meme repeated by people who need some reason to believe that people don't buy Apple's products on their own merits—much like the idea that it's a "cult".
Financing doesn't make anything cheaper relative to its alternatives (given that they can also be financed).
Which even in Sweden (one of the most expensive countries in Europe) is often as low as a lunch for two: https://www.tre.se/handla/mobiltelefoner/apple/iphone-15
> What's an equivalent iPhone to e.g. a Galaxy A54 (~1 year old, EUR ~300-350)?
There might not be, which doesn't make iPhone a "status symbol among the middle class and richest people in the EU". It's literally just a phone.
Do you ever video chat with friends or family? In my experience this is almost entirely over FaceTime, though zoom had its moment there during the lockdown.
If you’re just saying “you” then sure whatever, I put salsa on my toast.
iMessage isn't just a text messaging app, it also serves as a shared application fabric. The many iOS objects and apps are integrated into iMessage as first-class things that can be securely shared and seamlessly collaborated on between groups of people over the iMessage backbone. It isn't just group chats but also group content. If you have non-iMessage users in the group then all of this is disabled and it reverts to being a text message app. I know many average people that live in those collaboration features without even really thinking about it because they work so much more seamlessly than the alternatives.
In short, any portable version would still be nerfed, just slightly less nerfed than the current situation. The green bubbles would still be there to indicate that their platform can't support core functionality of iOS inside of iMessage.
It's a marketing gimmick designed to lock users in using network effects.
These psychological tricks work the best on teenagers and apple have been targeting kids to make them customers for life.
I don't have a dog in this fight but no one complaining ever really addresses this. iMessage is not just a chat app, even though many people like to pretend it is. It only looks like a chat app if you are not on iOS.