this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2026
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It's interesting that IOS users look to be a larger share than Android. I wonder why.
Most reddit users are from the us where ios has majority market share
Why do iPhones have such a grip on US?
When iPhone launched it was targeted at the general public.
Blackberry had successfully dominated the businesses. In apps, texting, e-mailing etc they were light-years ahead of everyone else at the time. Ther had a bit of a learning curve to figure out but it got the job done. Many of the things that the iPhone became famous for were blackberry inventions. They were also highly customizable with tons of options where you could tweak all sorts of stuff aka pretty complicated.
So Apple went after the consumer market where they had a major fan base built up from the iPod. The thing about the iPod that set it apart from other MP3 was it was extremely simple to use. Like your 50 year old MBA boss could use it simple (if someone loaded the MP3's for him) and no customization.
So the phone they made was about the same size as an iPod, and extremely simply to use. No customization because that created complexity. It was all tightly controlled.
Pretty soon it became the dominant phone in the market because as the current president shows, too many americans are fucking stupid. It remains the dominant phone because too many americans are fucking stupid.
It's a much more complex phone today but don't worry, most americans don't know how to use all the features anyway because they are too fucking stupid.
I think one of the main reasons Blackberry was swiftly killed off by the iPhone was that their devices had tiny non-touch screens that used 16-bit color, and RIM were unwilling to move on from that until it was far too late. The other reason is that the Blackberry app development environment was orders of magnitude more atrocious than anything else I worked with in my 25-year career. The development environment for iPhones was the second-worst but still massively better than Blackberry; even if RIM had moved to upgrade their devices, they never could have gotten anyone to develop apps for them.
The US was the first place smartphones took off and in the first couple years iPhone was the smartphone, so the initial set of adopters got iPhones because android wasn't really a consideration. Then the network effect, people got what their friends or family had. Also, since a lot of people get their phones payed for through their cellular carrier contract, they not super price sensitive since the cost was buried in a monthly bill.
So lots of people are used to IOS, and don’t see a reason to switch. Especially now with the one major differentiator, walled garden vs open platform, is disappearing with Google locking down their platform.
Blackberry was the smartphone in the first half of the '00s. And circa 2005 even Windows Mobile smartphones were gaining some traction (by "smartphone" I mean devices that are essentially handheld computers that can run apps and do a lot more than just calls and texting). They both got swamped by the iPhone because RIM and Microsoft were short-sighted idiots who failed to see the potential market and saw no need to improve their devices much, until it was too late. The iPhone wasn't the first, it was the best (at the time at least).
Once Android bootloaders got locked down I jumped ship. I loved custom ROMs. I also used to side load a lot of apks/emulate games. Now my Steam Deck is my dedicated emulation hand held, before that a modded 3DS. My only reasons to stay on Android disappeared.
Also iMessage is just so much better than allo/gmessages/hangouts/etc. I waited for over a decade for Google to create and stick with an ecosystem.
I loaded all my music on Google play music, then it was google music all access subscriptions, then it was YouTube music.
Tried to get the family into hangouts video, then it changed to duo+allo, then they killed allo so half the family abandoned duo…
It’s an endless cycle with Google. The kill more apps than most companies will ever create. Nobody has any buy in with their ecosystem because it’s dogshit.
If you like the idea of playing 3DS games on an Android device, you might want to check out the Ayn Thor
I really was only playing GBC/GBA games on Android. I meant that I went on to emulate those GBC/GBA games on 3DS and didn’t need Android anymore.
3DS is pretty much the only system that I prefer to play on original hardware.
But dang that is an impressive piece of kit! I kinda want one just as a backup to my N3dsXL.
It seems tied to the adult literacy rate.
partially because iMessage looks like texting but with a larger file size limit, partially as a status symbol.