> I personally like WP a lot, but this is (again) a winner-takes-it-all market.
But iPhone had seemingly won initially, and Android ate up ground from it even back when Android was complete shit. I think there's less lock-in for average users than there was with PCs, so it seems like what is required to gain market share is to give bigger cuts of the sales to the carriers who are selling the phones.
How long has it been since you went into an AT&T store and they tried to sell you an iPhone? They push Androids like it's crack they need to get rid of before the cops catch them. Because they make more money there.
>But the iPhone had seemingly won initially, and Android ate up ground from it even back when Android was complete shit.
Android gained its market share by being free. That's a strategy that only works once. Yes, Windows Phone is now free, but Android's market share lead (and corresponding advantage in network effects) is nigh insurmountable at this point.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Android : smartphones :: Windows : PCs. In both markets, Apple pursued a "high-end" integrated hardware/software strategy with a focus on premium devices and premium user experience. This opened up space for a secondary player to offer an inferior good - one that consumers could choose if they wanted similar capabilities and were willing to accept a certain level of degradation in fit and finish. The problem is that there's only room for one such player. In the PC space, that player is Windows. In the smartphone space, that player is Android. Windows Phone is like the BeOS of smartphone operating systems. It does a lot of interesting things, and it's better than Android in many ways, but network effects among software developers ensure that it'll never catch on. It's sad, but such is the market.
Still, from the consumer side of things there's far less friction/lock-in. Switching between phone platforms brings pain only in app selection, most data (like pictures, calendars and email) is all online and doesn't need to be moved over[1].
The key here like you say are software developers. I think Microsoft is aware of this and their purchase of Xamarin is them taking steps to solve this problem. In the future you could see Microsoft showing developers how they could build their applications for all major smartphone OSs with their tools, allowing them to eat up ground in the app space.
[1] Contrast this to PC vs Mac, where even switching from an old PC to a new PC can be a daunting task, and the risk of data-loss is high.
Re [1]: Windows has included a tool for migrating data to a new computer at least since Vista (I think for legacy versions it was a separate download). It works really, really well.
Windows on desktops had a lot of network effects that Android has no equivalent of.
Microsoft Office on Windows tied people in with proprietary document formats that pushed Windows for business use. In the smartphone world the main apps are cloud based and social (Facebook) and picture / video based, not document and complex data format based. Moving without losing anything you care about is much easier.
There's no Smartphone equivalent of "a Windows domain" - something that brought Windows into an entire office, once it had got into part of an office.
I suspect in the early days, people copied a lot of Windows software and that had a network effect because people had friends with programs and games. That effect has been closed off a bit by online activation and a lot by App stores and jailed environments. So if such an effect did help cement windows desktop adoption, it wouldn't help Android.
And what is there to support your claim that there's "only room for one such player" (second fiddle to iPhone)?
It's true that the main apps are cloud based, but cloud based isn't the same as open. The fact remains that apps come to iOS first, Android second, and Windows Phone sometime between months later and never. This is a real problem for Windows Phone users, especially when it comes to messaging apps. If all your friends are suddenly using Snapchat/WhatsApp/<new hot messaging app> you're going to be left out if you're on Windows Phone. In fact, you yourself refer to this phenomenon when you say, "people had friends with programs and games". Replace programs and games with messaging apps and social networks and you have exactly the same effect.
But iPhone had seemingly won initially, and Android ate up ground from it even back when Android was complete shit. I think there's less lock-in for average users than there was with PCs, so it seems like what is required to gain market share is to give bigger cuts of the sales to the carriers who are selling the phones.
How long has it been since you went into an AT&T store and they tried to sell you an iPhone? They push Androids like it's crack they need to get rid of before the cops catch them. Because they make more money there.