[gnrlist]

Chinese people want the Apple brand they don't care about iOS. If iOS was the status symbol it would get pirated and installed elsewhere. Apple has a strong brand because of it's history as a premium device company internationally, that's all. Their brand was their first mover advantage in China but now Chinese companies are closing that brand gap and since WeChat rules the software side Apple is going to have a hard time being a big player until it can differentiate itself on something other than brand.

[nullnilvoid]

Other than the brand factor, iPhone is actually a better phone. Before the current iPhone I have, I had always been an Android user. I used entry-level Android phones, high-end Android phones such as Samsung Galaxy, iPhone is clearly a better phone. iOS feels more smooth, reliable, battery-efficient in many ways than Android phones. Honestly, I have not looked back since the switch.

[blacksmith_tb]

Without wading into a my-anecdotes-against yours battle, I think most would agree that at this point Chinese smartphone shoppers have options from Xiaomi and Huawei among others[1] that are of equal quality to Apple hardware (and may be better designed for their market).

1: http://time.com/4547129/china-smartphone-market-oppo-vivo-xi...

[bobsam]

Huawei version of Android even looks like iOS.

I wish they had copied the more elegant windowsphone UI instead.

[threeseed]

The world has access to phones from Xiaomi and Huawei.

If they were equal to iPhones they would be selling out in Ireland, Australia, Cambodia - everywhere. Guess what ? They aren't equal to iPhones.

[user5994461]

Xiaomi are not available for sale outside of China. (Well, not without jumping through hoops and weird resellers).

They have zero name recognition worldwide and the platform is fitted to the china market. There are some minor localisation and translation work to go global. Most important of all: They lack the brand recognition (westerner are very sensitive to branding and associate china with cheap shit).

Outside of that, they do S6/iphone7 equivalents for half the price.

They could blow away every single android manufacturers single handedly if they went global.

[acchow]

I feel exactly the same way after switching away from top-tier Android. Never going back.

[unscaled]

> iPhone is clearly a better phone. iOS feels more smooth, reliable, battery-efficient in many ways than Android phones.

So what you're saying is that iOS is a better OS.

[Oletros]

> Other than the brand factor, iPhone is actually a better phone

But since a couple of years, any smartphone in a mid range price is good enough.

iPhones provide better experience and hardware? Perhaps, I won't debate that, they are premium and Apple does a fantastic job integrating their software with their hardware.

But to an average user, why pay +$700 when to their use case a $300 smartphone servers them well?

[otos]

iMessage is the only distinguishing benefit iPhone has. If WeChat or other apps are more popular in a market, I see Apple having a serious challenge.

The UI on the iPhone is incredibly challenging for me, especially web browsing.

I have a long list of criticisms on Android but both platforms seem incredibly flawed. The companies appear busy concoting marketing features and not with improving the functionality and experience.

I'm staying with the iPhone purely because of iMessage and Snapchat. I also don't want to waste time on the web, so the clunkiness is a benefit.

[bobsam]

> The companies appear busy concoting marketing features and not with improving the functionality and experience.

Really?? I feel Google and partners are introducing great new things and polishing existing stuff on a daily basis.

Windows phone on the other hand is doing the exact opposite :(

[cmurf]

Google, charitably, continues to step on their own d|ck at every possible opportunity when it comes to text communication (chat and sms). Apple definitely got this overwhelmingly correct with iMessage. Google can't even decide what stuff belongs in what app, and they've done the Hokey Pokey more times than I can count. SMS is now integrated in Google voice. SMS is now integrated into Hangouts. SMS is now moving out of Hangouts and into Messages or maybe Allo or maybe Duo. And optionally in a ravamped Google Voice.

Gchat is now in Hangouts. Hangouts works also in a laptop web browser. Allo and Duo and Messages do not work in a browser. And Allo will spam the recipient to also download Allo when delivering the message.

Meanwhile, in Hangouts, for two years, I can't play voicemails, I get a message that it's unavailable. One every phone I've bought including a Google Nexus branded phone, and a Motorola phone when Google owned Motorola.

Anyway, I'd say great new things sure. But there's always yet another new thing and new way of doing it. It's exhausting. There is no such thing as polishing existing stuff. They move on to new things before polish really ever catches on.

What's Windows phone? (Nevermind!)

[bobsam]

To be fair, apple has still not fixed their screw-you-for-leaving-ios-for-android SMS delivery bug after three years and one class action lawsuit...

What is windowsphone? The best smartphone OS before it was sabotaged from inside.

[cmurf]

I agree there's shenanigans with iMessage, which is why it's not perfect. But I personally have no evidence it's malicious rather than incompetency, and in other respects it's better than what Google is doing by leaps and bounds. (And I use Android, not iOS).

Windows Phone, I think given how far behind Microsoft was at the time it finally was released, they should have rolled it out as completely free and open source. And even at anytime up until about two years ago they could have done this. Now, I think it wouldn't matter. Too bad.

[krrrh]

As far as I know you can deregister a number from iMessage by logging in to your appleID on the web. There's no simple way for hem know whether you've switched to android or just put your phone in a drawer unless you log in and tell them.

[stcredzero]

Chinese people want the Apple brand they don't care about iOS. If iOS was the status symbol it would get pirated and installed elsewhere.

There is still a significant difference in quality! My girlfriend's Samsung phone has a lot more battery problems. The interface for changing settings isn't as nice. Changing the battery in a Samsung is a bit of an adventure, even for someone who has serviced his own Macbook over many years.

In terms of experience, Apple still has it over Samsung.

[oflannabhra]

Yep, that is the exact point of the article, but much more succinct.

[gnrlist]

Aside from it's verbosity, the only nit I have with the article is that it muddles it's own point by talking about iOS as a monopoly.

[MBCook]

I don't think so. Ben's point (as I took it) was that Apple has a monopoly on iOS (because only their devices have it) and that gives them a very strong hold on users, there is too much friction in switching to Android.

But in China if people don't really care about iOS that monopoly is worthless and their normal strategy for retaining users doesn't work, which means they're competing on a completely different basis in China than anywhere else.

[gnrlist]

Good point, I didn't get the nuance from my first pass reading it.

[yogenpro]

Chinese consumers do care about iOS vs Android. It's just that the Android ecosystem has been much too horrible in China (Play being blocked, big-name companies have their own "app store", affiliated apps keep waking up each other in background to increase DAU). Those problems go away automatically if you pick iPhone.

The best-selling Android phones in China (Oppo/Vivo, Huawei, Xiaomi) have this horrible problem in control, by providing their customized Android with aggressive permission control, background apps cleanup etc. This also closes up the gap between iOS and Android without Google's presence.

[archvile]

How would iOS get pirated when the only way to install it is by using a certificate that only Apple holds? If it was easy enough to reverse engineer iOS and remove that install requirement, I'm sure it would have been done by now.

[zeusk]

not really, and it's been done (not entirely successfully though).

https://twitter.com/CotullaCode/status/352176812194922496

I worked with Cotulla in the HD2 community during the htc-linux days and we had iOS 5.x booting on the device up till springboard, there were definitely issues but not "impossible".

[linkregister]

Seriously? There is a thriving jailbreak scene for iOS. It doesn't sound insurmountable at all. I think the only reason there's no iOS analogue to the Hackintosh is because nobody has bothered.

[LiweiZ]

Consumers in China do know iOS and iPhone are better. As I mentioned in another comment, it's just very hard for an outsider to get into China market as a service provider.

[threeseed]

> Chinese people want the Apple brand they don't care about iOS

These kind of statements are ridiculous.

(1) There is no evidence. (2) It assumes all of the Chinese think and act the same. (3) It assumes brand is the only decisioning metric when design and implementation can equally be important.

> If iOS was the status symbol it would get pirated and installed elsewhere

The look & feel of iPhones and iOS has been pirated and reimplemented on Android since day 1. You can goto MBK in Bangkok or Shenzhen in China and buy dozens of different models. Guess what ? They are nasty and buggy as hell and so don't sell.