Even the president can't sell a secure smartphone—thanks, Obama.
I'm starting to get concerned about a high-end smartphone monoculture here in the U.S. The Apple iPhone is a great device, but it needs solid competition to push it forward, and consumers need alternatives. We'll see just how massive the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus sales were in Apple's financial results later today.
Nothing shows the inability of other high-end smartphone makers to break through better than BlackBerry's continued failure. Over the weekend, we discovered that Russian hackers had managed to penetrate President Obama's unclassified emails—but his BlackBerry remained secure. That could be a huge selling point for the business-friendly phone maker. In this era of hacking-related uncertainty, BlackBerry may be the only smartphone you can count on. And yet its market share has finally stabilized—at 0.5 percent globally.
Some of the competing smartphone makers' failings are their own faults, of course. I found the BlackBerry Classic to have unpleasantly slow performance. Over on the Windows Phone side, Microsoft hasn't released a genuine flagship Windows Phone in more than a year, and Verizon buried last year's Lumia Icon.
The real question, though, is whether the Samsung Galaxy S6 is actually selling more slowly than expected. The Galaxy S6 is an amazing phone. It's my current phone. I love it. It's made of gorgeous materials, with a higher-quality camera than the iPhone and a wickedly fast processor. And yet its initial sales even in its home country, Samsung-friendly South Korea, haven't been matching up to forecasts. Forbes suggests it's because Samsung totally misjudged the relative demand for the standard S6 versus the sleek Edge model.
Now, I'm not saying Android is dying. Low-end and midrange Android manufacturers like ZTE and Alcatel are growing by leaps and bounds here in the U.S., and the general affordability of Android phones means that the platform is still globally dominant in market share.
But as a new Digi-Capital report shows, overall market share doesn't mean high-end market share. Digi-Capital says that for developers, every iOS user is worth 2.5 Android users. That means the best apps will keep flocking to iOS, and may reflect that in general, iOS is dominating the high end.
Separate and Unequal
This isn't like the PC platform consolidation of the mid-90s, when every home and business ran Windows. This is something a little more 21st-century—it's income inequality transposed into the technology realm.
This is America. Rich people get nice things. People who aren't rich get ... not so nice things. If everyone who can afford an iPhone buys an iPhone, and everyone who can't afford an iPhone buys Android, it'll be very interesting to see how the two ecosystems diverge in terms of apps, services, and devices offered.
The answer, of course, is for competing manufacturers to step up and offer great phones—and then to execute flawlessly on their strategies. It isn't impossible. Apple is doing it, and Samsung, BlackBerry, and Nokia all did it in the past. Hopefully today's Apple sales numbers will put some fire under competitors' feet and get them dancing.