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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!
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.
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.