A nice take on the non-premium smartphone market.
The takeaway is that the idea of Android is exciting because it gives mobile access to people who can’t/won’t pay for something like an iPhone. Sure, you don’t get that “polished” experience, but there are more situations than not where having mobile technology is more important than a cool sliding animation when you send a text message (that’s blatantly reductive, but hopefully the point is clear).
In this context, it’s important to forget about Android as “Android” and think of it as an effective mass-market mobile operating system. The Android branding is irrelevant compared to the OS’s utility.
The iPhone is heralded as the most revolutionary mobile phone in human history, but the cold and harsh truth is that for all the cheering and punditry, the iPhone’s impact on the world is negligible. Sure, it had a huge impact on the smartphone market in rich countries - but it didn’t have such an impact on the world.
For all the bad jokes directed at the company during its trying times, Nokia is the technology company that truly changed the world. Nokia put a mobile phone within every person’s reach. Even people in some of the poorest places on earth were given the ability to communicate wirelessly, thanks to Nokia making the mobile phone affordable to everyone. Personally, I see this as one of the greatest achievements of the technology world, but sadly, it’s often overlooked because “ooh Apple has pinch-to-zoom!!!1!”
What Nokia did for the mobile phone, Android is doing for the smartphone. It’s not Apple that’s going to put a smartphone in every corner of the globe - it’s not Microsoft; heck, not even Google, but Android. In ten to fifteen years’ time, we will look back and regard Android as the technology that enabled even the poorest people in this world to have access to the web (and thus, knowledge), just like we regard Nokia as the company that put the mobile phone in every corner of the globe.
