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Android Users Are So Committed that Exploding Note 7 Did Little To Help Apple: NPD (appleinsider.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Like loyalty to a political party or hometown sports team, smartphone users are extremely passionate about their choices -- a commitment that led many customers to stick with Samsung, despite the disaster of its downright dangerous Galaxy Note 7. Earlier this week, mobile analytics firm Flurry published data from the holiday season, showing that Apple saw twice as many device activations as rival Samsung. Despite Apple's continued commanding lead in holiday sales of smartphones and tablets, however, the numbers suggested Apple's share was lower and Samsung's was slightly higher from last year. Attempting to explain the trends shown in the data, NPD analyst Stephen Baker told The Wall Street Journal he believes that Android loyalists are committed, and even dangerous exploding batteries in the Galaxy Note 7 were not enough to push significant numbers of customers over to the iPhone. "Most of those who bought or wanted to buy a Note 7 opted for a different high-end Galaxy phone," Baker said.
it's not loyalty to android that keeps them from going to apple. it's apple that keeps them from going to apple
It's probably not so much they are fanatical about Android, but simply don't want to use Apple, and there's really only the one main competitor to turn to from there. If you don't want an Apple handset you are almost bound to buy an Android set, unless you have a fetish for Windows.
People are pretty heavily conditioned by decades of advertising to believe brand is a highly valuable thing when deciding which item to buy. Samsung has a lot of brand recognition and many leading products on the market - it's no surprise they held their ground.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
At the very least, the headline should had been "Samsung users".
The summery compares Samsung sales with Apple, not Android.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
How does this fanboy tripe make it to the front page? You could just as easily spin an alternate headline "iOS users are so committed that removing standard features in order to sell overpriced earbuds did little to help Samsung."
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Android is my mobile OS of choice, the hardware it runs on may not be Samsung on the next purchase
crazy dynamite monkey
Stop making it sound as if it was a flaw. that was a FEATURE DAMMIT!
Apple owners only wish they had that feature in their phones.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'd wager it's more the ecosystem lock in. Both of these app/media ecosystems have been around long enough that most users have a significant investment in them, whether they planned to or not.
The obvious lock in is previous app purchases, you don't want to have to rebuy all those apps and games you purchased on your first real app ecosystem.
If you have more than one person in the ecosystem, that's a real lock in... with app purchase and music subscription sharing, it simply costs more to have your family split between iOS and Android. In addition, you get access to great family features like location sharing when you all have the same type of device. So if you want to switch, you have to be ready to move not just your phone, but 2+ phones at the same time if you really use these features.
And not just money, but time, curating music libraries and playlists in the cloud music solution provided by the ecosystem takes time and effort. There do not appear to be many good tools to migrate this sort of thing over.
The article is nonsense. The "surprise" that users didn't opt to move to a phone with different software after having one with a hardware problem does presume that users are really stupid. I'm not saying many aren't, but not that stupid. The more reasonable expectation would be that they'd opt for another Android phone and not an Apple one.
The article mentions may opted for another Samsung phone, but fails to mention than in addition to offering refunds for the Note 7 they purchased, there were additional rebates if they purchased another Samsung phone as a replacement. ( http://venturebeat.com/2016/10... ) Samsung offered to pay people to stay with them and it seems to have worked.
Equating the decision to stick with the same OS and to take advantage of a $100 rebate as loyalty to a sports team ignores too many of the facts.
Ford Drivers So Committed That Exploding Pintos Did Little To Help Mercedes Benz.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Or maybe it's because Note 7 sales only accounted for 0.6% of 3Q 2016 Android sales. (2 million Note 7s vs 328.6 million Android handsets sold (autoplay video warning). Yes, Android sales for the quarter were nearly 1.5x the iPhone's typical sales for a year. 2016 sales figures aren't in yet, but in 2015 Android sold 1.2 billion units. The Note 7 sales would only be 0.17% of that.
The only people who make a big deal about the Note 7 fiasco are Note 7 owners, Samsung stockholders, and Apple fanboys (where TFA comes from). Compared to Android's overall sales, Note 7 sales were a drop in the bucket. Every single Note 7 owner could've switched to iPhones and you would've needed 3 significant figures to even notice.
Changing your phone OS is the same as changing that on your computer: you have to replace software, reconfigure stuff, re-train yourself. It's a real effort, and so it's not surprising it takes more than one bum phone to make people go through it.
You could apply the same logic to the missing headphone jack on the iPhone 7. Many would argue it's a limitation rather than a feature, but not, apparently, a big enough limitation to make people switch.
Most Android users are not Note 7 users, or Note x users, or even Samsung users, so this seems obvious. Should a Ford F-250 having electrical issues convince me to buy a Hyundai sedan, or dissuade me from buying a Chevy crossover SUV?
Android users are Android users because Android works for them, and/or they have no interest in iOS or Apple products. When did the iphone v. Samsung (if not just the Note) become the only smartphone story in the media, anyway? I still like my old LG G3 because it works, and will probably buy a ZTE Axon 7 soon. There are plenty of good non-Samsung options that are also not iphones.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Do a google search for iPhone6 or iPhone7 fire. You'll find that they also had a few incidents :-)
The Note7 had a higher incidence of it because of some dumb design decisions to maximize battery size, but phones catching fire because of lithium batteries is not a new thing...