Linked List: September 2, 2022

Friday, 2 September 2022

What Explains Android vs. iPhone Usage Share Discrepancies Between Countries? 

Today’s earlier item about iPhone usage share overtaking Android in the U.S. led to an interesting thread on Twitter regarding the seemingly curious large differences in iPhone/Android share between different countries. The iPhone is particularly popular in the U.S. and Japan, and in English-speaking countries (Canada, United Kingdom, Australia) in general. Android, for obvious reasons, is overwhelmingly popular in poorer countries. But there are wealthy countries like Germany and France where Android is more popular by roughly 3 to 1 margins. I suspect there is no simple answer to this, and that it comes down to nuanced but significant nation-by-nation cultural differences.

If any readers in Germany, France, or Japan (or from anywhere, for that matter) have ideas about this, I’m all ears.

Was iCloud the Final ‘iName’? 

Last week on Twitter, in a thread speculating on what Apple might name its widely-rumored upcoming VR headset, I mentioned that I don’t expect it to be named with an “i” prefix. I tweeted that iPad, introduced in 2010, was the last such name. A few followers chimed in that iCloud, introduced at WWDC 2011, came later.

iCloud was the last new Apple product or service introduced by Steve Jobs. To my knowledge, no one at, or formerly at, Apple has ever come out and said it, but it seems pretty clear that those iNames were a Steve Jobs thing. I would expect future Apple products and services to be named like Apple Watch — “Apple” followed by a simple descriptive word.

Update: iMessage was announced (by Scott Forstall, with a humorous assist from Joz) during the same WWDC 2011 keynote where Jobs announced iCloud. Let’s call it a tie then: iCloud and iMessage are the last new iNames.

Claris Is Renaming FileMaker 

Adam Engst, writing at TidBITS:

Claris will rename FileMaker Pro, FileMaker Go (for deploying FileMaker apps on the iPhone and iPad), and FileMaker Server (for hosting multi-user FileMaker apps) to Claris Pro, Claris Go, and Claris Server. A new Web-based development environment called Claris Studio will join and integrate with the other products to provide a modern, cloud-based system. Claris Studio can — among much else — host public-facing forms that pipe data from anonymous Web users into Claris Pro and create tables, graphs, and dashboards using data from Claris Pro.

The more important change for longtime individual FileMaker users is that there will be a freemium version of Claris Pro with free access to Claris Studio (and presumably Claris Go). Its only restriction is that databases created with the freemium version are restricted to a single user — but there are no size or time constraints.

This is apparently months-old news, but I hadn’t seen it. I’d have thought they should keep the “FileMaker” name and get rid of “Claris”, but either way, this is clarifying. Perhaps today’s FileMaker is so different from days of yore that it deserves a new brand.

Jeff Bezos on Bet-the-Company Bets 

Jeff Bezos, back in 2014 in an interview with Henry Blodget:

What really matters is, companies that don’t continue to experiment, companies that don’t embrace failure, they eventually get in a desperate position where the only thing they can do is a Hail Mary bet at the very end of their corporate existence. Whereas companies that are making bets all along, even big bets, but not bet-the-company bets, prevail. I don’t believe in bet-the-company bets. That’s when you’re desperate. That’s the last thing you can do.

Is Facebook’s AR/VR play really a bet-the-company bet? To me it feels like it. They changed the name of the whole company and supposedly have over 10,000 employees working on it. What else are they betting on for the future, other than hamfistedly trying to turn Instagram into a Frankensteinian amalgam of TikTok and QVC.

WSJ: ‘Wait, When Did Everyone Start Using Apple Pay?’ 

Ben Cohen, writing last month for The Wall Street Journal:

The percentage of iPhones with Apple Pay activated was 10% in 2016 and 20% in 2017, according to research from Loup Ventures, as most people seemed perfectly happy with their plastic cards and leather wallets. Adoption nearly doubled again in 2018. It hit 50% by 2020. Now it’s around 75% and inching closer to ubiquity. Of course, not every account that gets activated remains in active use.

So what changed? We did. Apple’s executives remained confident about the future even when the present wasn’t so rosy because they could look at the rest of the world’s acceptance of contactless payments and see that the U.S. was lagging years behind.

Apple excels at playing long games. Apple Pay is one example that started well — even though that good start was dismissed by skeptics — and has grown steadily. Apple Maps is an even better example, because it started terribly, but now is quite competitive.

The Great Potato Capers 

I heard this story for the first time yesterday, on Keith Olbermann’s Countdown, and it’s so damn funny I can’t believe I hadn’t heard it before.

Counterpoint Research: iPhone Overtakes Android in U.S. Usage Share 

Patrick McGee, reporting for The Financial Times:

The 50 per cent landmark — the iPhone’s highest share since it launched in 2007 — was first passed in the quarter ending in June, according to data from Counterpoint Research. Some 150 devices using Google’s Android operating system, led by Samsung and Lenovo, accounted for the rest.

I was not aware that Lenovo is second behind Samsung in Android phones. [Update: I had completely forgotten that Lenovo bought Motorola in 2014; now it makes perfect sense that they’re #2.]

The numbers are based on smartphones in use, known as the “active installed base”, what Apple finance chief Luca Maestri dubbed “the engine for our company” in a July earnings call. This is a wider and more meaningful category than new phone shipments, which fluctuate from quarter to quarter and have already demonstrated Apple’s newfound strength.

The active installed base takes into account the millions of people brought into Apple’s ecosystem through the used phone market, as well as those who use iPhones purchased years ago.

You don’t hear so much about “open beats closed” anymore.

I also continue to think Google is bored with Android. Two years ago I wrote:

Do you get the sense that Google, company-wide, is all that interested in Android? I don’t. Both as the steward of the software platform and as the maker of Pixel hardware, it seems like Google is losing interest in Android. Flagship Android hardware makers sure are interested in Android, but they can’t move the Android developer ecosystem — only Google can.

Apple, institutionally, is as attentive to the iPhone and iOS as it has ever been. I think Google, institutionally, is bored with Android.

Nothing in the last two years has changed my mind on that. Android is certainly still a thing for Google. It’s a priority. But it’s nowhere near the top of Google’s priorities. Nothing ranks higher amongst Apple’s priorities than the iPhone and iOS. Year after year, that difference in prioritization adds up.

The other interesting takeaway here is that iPhone usage share outperforms iPhone sales share. iPhones are simply more durable and get meaningful software updates for longer. People use their iPhones longer, and they have far more resale value.