Thanks, that's a good point. My favourite mobile browser is Opera Mobile, which I love on my 5800; I guess the Apple phones will never have that.
Even for Opera Mini, it's interesting to note the idea of having to wait for approval, as well as not supporting open standards like Java (again, because of the locked down nature), so they had to presumably rewrite the application for Apple. I was using Opera Mini years ago on my Motorola V980, before the first Iphone was even released.
Yes - I was amused to see that even my 5800 at half the price (which is never mentioned at all in the media) beats the Iphone resolution hands down (and in other ways, too).
It's interesting to see how the "one model" idea is backfiring. The supposed advantage is that if there's only one model, it means there's a standard set of features that application developers can assume. Okay fine, I can see that. But the downside of this is that technology moves on quickly - Apple either has to end up with outdated technology as they are currently doing, or choose between either updating it (in which case, they've the problem of multiple different models, same as anyone else after all), or breaking compatibility with an all new phone, which then just fragments their market, and risks losing their old users.
Indeed. And that reminds me, when I have pointed out Nokia's dominating market share in the past, I inevitably get an Iphone fan pleading how it's not a fair comparison, because Apple have only been in the market for three years, and we should be amazed how a billion dollar company has managed to obtain a few per cent market share in that short time. So it's amusing to see that this argument doesn't apply for Android, for some reason.
Of course it's the same old story - any argument whatsoever is valid if it is in favour of Apple, and invalid when it isn't.
The iPhone is dominating them as well. Units shipped is a poor metric. Apple is by far the most popular smart phone in terms of usage, in terms of apps, in terms of customer satisfaction, in terms of profitability. You name it.
Did you really just say that? Number of items sold is a "poor metric" in terms of how popular each company is?
Standard Apple fan tactic - redefine market share to mean something else. Let's see:
* Do you have stats for how much people use their phone? If you mean web usage, that's a poor indicator. It just rewards Iphone users for being wasteful on downloads when people such as me try to respect fair usage limits on our networks. Furthermore, it penalises platforms like Symbian that are more efficient on download usage (e.g., maps can be stored locally). * You have a source for the number of "apps" - nope, I'm not interesting in only the official app stores, as it's only Apple that restricts you to those. * Customer satisfaction? You have a source for this? It's a "poor metric" anyhow in terms of how a company dominates. * Yes, Apple make money off of people. From the consumer point of view, I'm not sure why this is most important - and by that logic, you should be loving Microsoft.
However, it's pretty undeniable that Apple is the market leader. The only metric they don't have covered is most units sold.
God, you really believe it don't you. The RDF is so powerful, that you've given up any attempt to argue reasonably - instead you just twist everything to its advantage.
Seriously, let's enter fantasy land for a moment, and imagine that Apple really were the market leader - which means, to everyone else on the planet, selling the most number. You'd be all over it, saying how wonderful Apple was - and if it was Nokia at 5% of market share, but someone say "But people are more satisfied with Nokia, honest", would you believe them, and agree that Nokia were market leader? Of course not.
And now I'm going to argue that the Amiga is the market leader in computers. Sure, it doesn't sell well or anything like that, but that's a poor metric. People were always satisfied with them, so I'm going to claim it's the best, therefore that's what counts, and it's market leader. You can't argue with that, can you?
Year after year Apple finds a way to improve upon the smart phone, surpassing their last product.
Yes, just like every other company in the market. It's what we call progress. In technology, it happens a lot.
But they know about things like the Google phone, Droid, and so on. Although having said that, I do agree - the overwhelming free advertising for Apple, but less so for Google, means that Android unfairly has it harder. (It's interesting though that the biggest player in the market (Nokia) don't get any free advertising at all - they're hardly even mentioned here on Slashdot, for example.)
Yet iPhone dominates Android in the market. Why do you suppose that is?
Because most people are buying neither - they're both dominated by other companies (most notably, Nokia). I don't know what the Iphone is selling better than Android, though the latter hasn't been available for long, and it will be interesting if the other phone companies switch over to Android entirely, as their market share (even individually) beats Apple.
The only inherent strength that Android has over iPhone is tinkerability.
What strengths do the Iphones have?
The fact that this resonates so well with many here on Slashdot is no surprise, and I'm glad such a phone exists for them, but to mistake niche appeal for something more than it is is a big mistake.
Quoted for irony. That's exactly how I see people's view regarding the Iphones, here on Slashdot. You shouldn't mistake niche appeal for something more than that.
I agree, although I'd say the more interesting comparison will be Android versus Symbian, as Nokia have the largest market share - how Android does compared to other small players is of little relevance to the big picture.
Android has the advantage of taking advantage of the market share from all the other companies (e.g., LG, Samsung, Motorola) who currently don't have their own decent OS, and hence may be eager to use Android (as Motorola have done - not sure about the others yet?) but can nonetheless ship plenty of phones (all of them have way more market share than Apple). But at 40-50% of the market, Nokia are still some strong competition to that.
I'm also curious to see what will happen to the low end. Symbian is already on low end phones (e.g., the Nokia 5230 at only £100 on PAYG in the UK, which is pretty much well into "feature phone" price range). Feature phones have long hand Internet access and apps, and now have large touchscreens - the limiting factor is traditionally the OS. For Nokia, we could see them ship Symbian on even lower end phones. Meanwhile, what if Android starts shipping on these cheap phones? These are the phones which dominate, and once they have the OS, for most people these phones will be good enough. Apple won't get a look in, unless they dramatically change their style (selling products at high profit margins is generally what they prefer).
Note that one problem with a Mac/whatever versus PC/Windows analogy is that by the time that platforms like the Mac, Amiga, etc appeared, the PC was already dominant. Here, the dominant platform is Symbian, and the "open" Android is having to fight against that.
iPhone continues to dominate the consumer smartphone space
Well, for starters, they don't - just check the market data. No one company dominates, but closest are Nokia, at 40-50%.
And whilst updating firmware is annoying, how is this any different to the "But it can do that if you jailbreak it" response when someone points out how the Iphones lack a basic feature? You think random member of the public knows what "jailbreaking" is - and would want to try something so dubious sounding to their expensive product?
I don't know about Android, but the claims you list for Apple are true for Symbian too.
My thoughts exactly - there are other tablets around, and there's no need to give free hype to Apple even when we're covering other products (for once) by calling them "iWhatever Rival/Killer/etc". It was bad enough with the Iphone (who cares about rivalling Apple, when there are loads of bigger companies in that market?) It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy - these products aren't compared to Apple because of anything to do with Apple, it simply results from the media always comparing to Apple in the first place.
Or maybe we could just quit with the astroturfing and say "Google Preparing Tablet Computer". This is supposed to be a place for geeks - we know what products like mp3 players, phones and tablets are, without needing to be told in terms of brand names. (Was the news of Google releasing ChromeOS announced with "Google Preparing Windows Rival (or worse, OS X Rival)"? Was Firefox announced as being an "Internet Explorer Rival?" Was the first Iphone announced as being a "Windows Mobile Rival"?)
As devices go, it's not only one of the most technically capable phones on the market, it's also the ONLY real smartphone that fits in the pocket of a pair of jeans.
My 5800 fits nicely, it has a slightly slimmer "candybar" form, compared with the wider smartphones. Not that I disagree with your post in general, just pointing this out.
One of the problems is that in all the side-by-side reviews, the Pre always beats out the Pixi because...wait for it...it can't run as many apps at once. (Note: the iPhone presently can't run more than one, and reviewers worship it.) So people buy the Pre, and then aren't happy with it because the form factor is annoying and the keyboard is unusable (and because they expect their battery to last three days while they watch videos over Wi-Fi). And Palm gets a bad rap, even though they make a device that people would fall in love en masse with if they weren't talked out of giving it half a chance.
Indeed. The rule is that if Apple miss out a fundamental feature, the media rave about it anyway and it gets spun as unimportant, or even an advantage. If another company does this, it's seen as a bad thing.
OS X was new, not too long ago, too. Good thing for you that people didn't have the same attitude there. (It's funny how Apple fans love to say how they're being different, but look down upon anything that's different to them - just look at the vile that gets spouted every once in a blue moon there's an Amiga story.)
If the worst happens, they could just stick the BeOS name on a new OS, which is what happened to Mac, anyway.
What happened to Palm? I remember when their "PalmPilot" was like the iPhone today - people had to have it.
You mean, not many people had either? Except whilst smartphones were rare back then, today almost every phone does these things. There are many products that do these things, and given that companies like Nokia, Motorola, LG, Samsung, RIM all sell more, the "had to have it" factor is clearly not unique to Apple, I'm afraid.
Nope, you're voice isn't the many. Most criticisms of Wikipedia are that there aren't enough citations - you're here arguing that citations shouldn't be required! (Because anyone who edits must be an expert, and anyone who challenges it knows nothing, honest!)
Yes, because obviously it's so much better to have an online Wiki where anyone can edit, but have it so that people can write any nonsense they like, without citations, and not having it challenged.
If they're really experts, then they should have no trouble providing the citations. And if they're instead looking to publish original research, then an encyclopedia isn't the correct place in the first place.
If they're going to start a Wiki that anyone can edit, and not delete anything, even if it's complete nonsense and isn't cited, then good luck to them. Let me know how it works out! I'd love to see how you get on, when you rely on something that's completely unsourced!
In which case, I hope all the Wikipedia-haters here will also be criticising this new site, for lacking citations, and containing stuff that they think isn't important enough.
(I love how Wikipedia draws criticism from complete opposite directions - "I added something without a reference and it got deleted, boo hoo!" / "Wikipedia doesn't have references"; or "Wikipedia has too much information about something I don't care about" / "I made an article about my pet hampster and it got deleted, boo hoo!". Which is it? Everyone can't be pleased.
You have articles that can be edited by anyone in the world, and you expect it to be easy, with no disagreements on what it should say?
You're not looking for a Wiki - you need a homepage or a blog.
I've dealt with complex series of rules (i.e. United States Tax Code) which are easier to circumnavigate than Wikipedia's ego-driven drivel.
Examples? Let's see you do better.
The actual rules are rather limited - everything else is built up from discussion. Yes, there's a lot of it, because there's a lot to cover - that's better than trying to reinvent the rules inconsistently everytime.
Not really - it's still better off to reply, and explain why they are wrong. Otherwise, how do we know whether it was bad advice they gave, or just the opinion of the minority who get mod points?
Millions of people view porn, those people generally like to have sex
Correlation is not causation - are you suggesting they only have sex because they watched porn?
People would look at child porn and would want to have sex with a child
The thing that you're actually asserting is that people who want to have sex with children, will do so. I'm not sure this is true in all cases, but either way, it's irrelevant to images - and certainly to the issue of fictional images.
(Most people don't have the choice to have sex with someone they want - people routinely might fancy someone, who doesn't wish to have sex with them - I guess according to you, this means that they go and rape them? I wouldn't want any woman to be near you, with that attitude... We criminalise actual images of children because of the harm done in their production, not because of the hoops of illogic that you are trying to argue.)
The iPhone economy is the largest in the world where over 4 billion apps have been downloaded.
The Iphone is an economy now, is it? We can't compare application downloads, because this data doesn't exist for other platforms, where you are free to download from where you like.
If you are mobile developer wanting to make the *most money* developing commercial applications, to make efficient use for your resources *you have no choice* but to develop for the iPhone/iPad.
If you say so. I agree with you about how the limitations placed by Apple are ridiculous.
Although if one is going to play the game of redefining the "market", you might as well just say that Apple have 100% market share of the Iphone market. Yes it's true, but it's not very useful information. The relevant market here is phones which can run applications - which contrary to popular belief, is more than simply "smartphone". Running applications was a smartphone only thing, ooh, about 10 years ago. It's been bog standard on most phones now for at least 5 years ago. Here, their worldwide share is barely 5% from when I last checked. In the US it will be higher, but still less than 25%, as you say.
which incidentally is quite a high number for a single phone model on a single carrier
The Iphone is not a single model - there have been several generations, with different models in each generation. And even if this was true, why should Apple be looked more highly for having one model, whilst other companies prefer to differentiate? It's still Apple's market share versus another company. If they only had one model, then they'd also be able to focus all their resources into that one model, so it makes no difference when comparing.
I agree it might well be true that Apple have a larger share of the market of "app stores" - simply because no other platform is locked down to only be able to use one app store.
Um yes, that was his point - that since this isn't the case, it doesn't make sense for the OP to claim "It's just common sense that you have to have the platform your tools run on to use the tools."
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks, that's a good point. My favourite mobile browser is Opera Mobile, which I love on my 5800; I guess the Apple phones will never have that.
Even for Opera Mini, it's interesting to note the idea of having to wait for approval, as well as not supporting open standards like Java (again, because of the locked down nature), so they had to presumably rewrite the application for Apple. I was using Opera Mini years ago on my Motorola V980, before the first Iphone was even released.
Yes - I was amused to see that even my 5800 at half the price (which is never mentioned at all in the media) beats the Iphone resolution hands down (and in other ways, too).
It's interesting to see how the "one model" idea is backfiring. The supposed advantage is that if there's only one model, it means there's a standard set of features that application developers can assume. Okay fine, I can see that. But the downside of this is that technology moves on quickly - Apple either has to end up with outdated technology as they are currently doing, or choose between either updating it (in which case, they've the problem of multiple different models, same as anyone else after all), or breaking compatibility with an all new phone, which then just fragments their market, and risks losing their old users.
Indeed. And that reminds me, when I have pointed out Nokia's dominating market share in the past, I inevitably get an Iphone fan pleading how it's not a fair comparison, because Apple have only been in the market for three years, and we should be amazed how a billion dollar company has managed to obtain a few per cent market share in that short time. So it's amusing to see that this argument doesn't apply for Android, for some reason.
Of course it's the same old story - any argument whatsoever is valid if it is in favour of Apple, and invalid when it isn't.
The iPhone is dominating them as well. Units shipped is a poor metric. Apple is by far the most popular smart phone in terms of usage, in terms of apps, in terms of customer satisfaction, in terms of profitability. You name it.
Did you really just say that? Number of items sold is a "poor metric" in terms of how popular each company is?
Standard Apple fan tactic - redefine market share to mean something else. Let's see:
* Do you have stats for how much people use their phone? If you mean web usage, that's a poor indicator. It just rewards Iphone users for being wasteful on downloads when people such as me try to respect fair usage limits on our networks. Furthermore, it penalises platforms like Symbian that are more efficient on download usage (e.g., maps can be stored locally).
* You have a source for the number of "apps" - nope, I'm not interesting in only the official app stores, as it's only Apple that restricts you to those.
* Customer satisfaction? You have a source for this? It's a "poor metric" anyhow in terms of how a company dominates.
* Yes, Apple make money off of people. From the consumer point of view, I'm not sure why this is most important - and by that logic, you should be loving Microsoft.
However, it's pretty undeniable that Apple is the market leader. The only metric they don't have covered is most units sold.
God, you really believe it don't you. The RDF is so powerful, that you've given up any attempt to argue reasonably - instead you just twist everything to its advantage.
Seriously, let's enter fantasy land for a moment, and imagine that Apple really were the market leader - which means, to everyone else on the planet, selling the most number. You'd be all over it, saying how wonderful Apple was - and if it was Nokia at 5% of market share, but someone say "But people are more satisfied with Nokia, honest", would you believe them, and agree that Nokia were market leader? Of course not.
And now I'm going to argue that the Amiga is the market leader in computers. Sure, it doesn't sell well or anything like that, but that's a poor metric. People were always satisfied with them, so I'm going to claim it's the best, therefore that's what counts, and it's market leader. You can't argue with that, can you?
Year after year Apple finds a way to improve upon the smart phone, surpassing their last product.
Yes, just like every other company in the market. It's what we call progress. In technology, it happens a lot.
They probably don't know what Darwin is either.
But they know about things like the Google phone, Droid, and so on. Although having said that, I do agree - the overwhelming free advertising for Apple, but less so for Google, means that Android unfairly has it harder. (It's interesting though that the biggest player in the market (Nokia) don't get any free advertising at all - they're hardly even mentioned here on Slashdot, for example.)
Yet iPhone dominates Android in the market. Why do you suppose that is?
Because most people are buying neither - they're both dominated by other companies (most notably, Nokia). I don't know what the Iphone is selling better than Android, though the latter hasn't been available for long, and it will be interesting if the other phone companies switch over to Android entirely, as their market share (even individually) beats Apple.
The only inherent strength that Android has over iPhone is tinkerability.
What strengths do the Iphones have?
The fact that this resonates so well with many here on Slashdot is no surprise, and I'm glad such a phone exists for them, but to mistake niche appeal for something more than it is is a big mistake.
Quoted for irony. That's exactly how I see people's view regarding the Iphones, here on Slashdot. You shouldn't mistake niche appeal for something more than that.
I agree, although I'd say the more interesting comparison will be Android versus Symbian, as Nokia have the largest market share - how Android does compared to other small players is of little relevance to the big picture.
Android has the advantage of taking advantage of the market share from all the other companies (e.g., LG, Samsung, Motorola) who currently don't have their own decent OS, and hence may be eager to use Android (as Motorola have done - not sure about the others yet?) but can nonetheless ship plenty of phones (all of them have way more market share than Apple). But at 40-50% of the market, Nokia are still some strong competition to that.
I'm also curious to see what will happen to the low end. Symbian is already on low end phones (e.g., the Nokia 5230 at only £100 on PAYG in the UK, which is pretty much well into "feature phone" price range). Feature phones have long hand Internet access and apps, and now have large touchscreens - the limiting factor is traditionally the OS. For Nokia, we could see them ship Symbian on even lower end phones. Meanwhile, what if Android starts shipping on these cheap phones? These are the phones which dominate, and once they have the OS, for most people these phones will be good enough. Apple won't get a look in, unless they dramatically change their style (selling products at high profit margins is generally what they prefer).
Note that one problem with a Mac/whatever versus PC/Windows analogy is that by the time that platforms like the Mac, Amiga, etc appeared, the PC was already dominant. Here, the dominant platform is Symbian, and the "open" Android is having to fight against that.
iPhone continues to dominate the consumer smartphone space
Well, for starters, they don't - just check the market data. No one company dominates, but closest are Nokia, at 40-50%.
And whilst updating firmware is annoying, how is this any different to the "But it can do that if you jailbreak it" response when someone points out how the Iphones lack a basic feature? You think random member of the public knows what "jailbreaking" is - and would want to try something so dubious sounding to their expensive product?
I don't know about Android, but the claims you list for Apple are true for Symbian too.
My thoughts exactly - there are other tablets around, and there's no need to give free hype to Apple even when we're covering other products (for once) by calling them "iWhatever Rival/Killer/etc". It was bad enough with the Iphone (who cares about rivalling Apple, when there are loads of bigger companies in that market?) It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy - these products aren't compared to Apple because of anything to do with Apple, it simply results from the media always comparing to Apple in the first place.
Or maybe we could just quit with the astroturfing and say "Google Preparing Tablet Computer". This is supposed to be a place for geeks - we know what products like mp3 players, phones and tablets are, without needing to be told in terms of brand names. (Was the news of Google releasing ChromeOS announced with "Google Preparing Windows Rival (or worse, OS X Rival)"? Was Firefox announced as being an "Internet Explorer Rival?" Was the first Iphone announced as being a "Windows Mobile Rival"?)
Slagging off alternative operating systems - insightful.
Pointing out the same applies to Apple - flamebait. Yep, that says it all about this place these days.
As devices go, it's not only one of the most technically capable phones on the market, it's also the ONLY real smartphone that fits in the pocket of a pair of jeans.
My 5800 fits nicely, it has a slightly slimmer "candybar" form, compared with the wider smartphones. Not that I disagree with your post in general, just pointing this out.
One of the problems is that in all the side-by-side reviews, the Pre always beats out the Pixi because...wait for it...it can't run as many apps at once. (Note: the iPhone presently can't run more than one, and reviewers worship it.) So people buy the Pre, and then aren't happy with it because the form factor is annoying and the keyboard is unusable (and because they expect their battery to last three days while they watch videos over Wi-Fi). And Palm gets a bad rap, even though they make a device that people would fall in love en masse with if they weren't talked out of giving it half a chance.
Indeed. The rule is that if Apple miss out a fundamental feature, the media rave about it anyway and it gets spun as unimportant, or even an advantage. If another company does this, it's seen as a bad thing.
Funny, I don't remember Apple going bankrupt when they did the same thing.
OS X was new, not too long ago, too. Good thing for you that people didn't have the same attitude there. (It's funny how Apple fans love to say how they're being different, but look down upon anything that's different to them - just look at the vile that gets spouted every once in a blue moon there's an Amiga story.)
If the worst happens, they could just stick the BeOS name on a new OS, which is what happened to Mac, anyway.
What happened to Palm? I remember when their "PalmPilot" was like the iPhone today - people had to have it.
You mean, not many people had either? Except whilst smartphones were rare back then, today almost every phone does these things. There are many products that do these things, and given that companies like Nokia, Motorola, LG, Samsung, RIM all sell more, the "had to have it" factor is clearly not unique to Apple, I'm afraid.
I'll add my voice to the many
Nope, you're voice isn't the many. Most criticisms of Wikipedia are that there aren't enough citations - you're here arguing that citations shouldn't be required! (Because anyone who edits must be an expert, and anyone who challenges it knows nothing, honest!)
Yes, because obviously it's so much better to have an online Wiki where anyone can edit, but have it so that people can write any nonsense they like, without citations, and not having it challenged.
If they're really experts, then they should have no trouble providing the citations. And if they're instead looking to publish original research, then an encyclopedia isn't the correct place in the first place.
If they're going to start a Wiki that anyone can edit, and not delete anything, even if it's complete nonsense and isn't cited, then good luck to them. Let me know how it works out! I'd love to see how you get on, when you rely on something that's completely unsourced!
In which case, I hope all the Wikipedia-haters here will also be criticising this new site, for lacking citations, and containing stuff that they think isn't important enough.
(I love how Wikipedia draws criticism from complete opposite directions - "I added something without a reference and it got deleted, boo hoo!" / "Wikipedia doesn't have references"; or "Wikipedia has too much information about something I don't care about" / "I made an article about my pet hampster and it got deleted, boo hoo!". Which is it? Everyone can't be pleased.
You have articles that can be edited by anyone in the world, and you expect it to be easy, with no disagreements on what it should say?
You're not looking for a Wiki - you need a homepage or a blog.
I've dealt with complex series of rules (i.e. United States Tax Code) which are easier to circumnavigate than Wikipedia's ego-driven drivel.
Examples? Let's see you do better.
The actual rules are rather limited - everything else is built up from discussion. Yes, there's a lot of it, because there's a lot to cover - that's better than trying to reinvent the rules inconsistently everytime.
The kids have a 6 page "Acceptable Use Contract" with us (their eyes went wide when they saw this)
I don't think the word "contract" means what you think it means.
Not really - it's still better off to reply, and explain why they are wrong. Otherwise, how do we know whether it was bad advice they gave, or just the opinion of the minority who get mod points?
Microsoft were convicted of violation of anti-trust laws related to their monopoly
Yes, that was exactly my point. They were still a monopoly, even though there were other suppliers of desktop operating systems.
Millions of people view porn, those people generally like to have sex
Correlation is not causation - are you suggesting they only have sex because they watched porn?
People would look at child porn and would want to have sex with a child
The thing that you're actually asserting is that people who want to have sex with children, will do so. I'm not sure this is true in all cases, but either way, it's irrelevant to images - and certainly to the issue of fictional images.
(Most people don't have the choice to have sex with someone they want - people routinely might fancy someone, who doesn't wish to have sex with them - I guess according to you, this means that they go and rape them? I wouldn't want any woman to be near you, with that attitude... We criminalise actual images of children because of the harm done in their production, not because of the hoops of illogic that you are trying to argue.)
The iPhone economy is the largest in the world where over 4 billion apps have been downloaded.
The Iphone is an economy now, is it? We can't compare application downloads, because this data doesn't exist for other platforms, where you are free to download from where you like.
If you are mobile developer wanting to make the *most money* developing commercial applications, to make efficient use for your resources *you have no choice* but to develop for the iPhone/iPad.
If you say so. I agree with you about how the limitations placed by Apple are ridiculous.
Although if one is going to play the game of redefining the "market", you might as well just say that Apple have 100% market share of the Iphone market. Yes it's true, but it's not very useful information. The relevant market here is phones which can run applications - which contrary to popular belief, is more than simply "smartphone". Running applications was a smartphone only thing, ooh, about 10 years ago. It's been bog standard on most phones now for at least 5 years ago. Here, their worldwide share is barely 5% from when I last checked. In the US it will be higher, but still less than 25%, as you say.
which incidentally is quite a high number for a single phone model on a single carrier
The Iphone is not a single model - there have been several generations, with different models in each generation. And even if this was true, why should Apple be looked more highly for having one model, whilst other companies prefer to differentiate? It's still Apple's market share versus another company. If they only had one model, then they'd also be able to focus all their resources into that one model, so it makes no difference when comparing.
I agree it might well be true that Apple have a larger share of the market of "app stores" - simply because no other platform is locked down to only be able to use one app store.
People develop for all those platforms. They were doing so long before Apple turned up late to the party.
Sorry that your eurofantasy
No, he's quite right on worldwide figures, including the USA.
Um yes, that was his point - that since this isn't the case, it doesn't make sense for the OP to claim "It's just common sense that you have to have the platform your tools run on to use the tools."