Across the world, the biggest smartphone manufacturers are Apple (28%), Samsung (24%), Xiaomi (12%), Oppo (6%) and Vivo (5%). However, there are geographic patterns in popularity, with Apple dominating North America and East Asia, while Samsung leads in South America, Europe, Africa and West Asia in addition to its home turf of South Korea. Xiaomi is the most popular phone brand across South Asia, Spain, Venezuela, Ukraine, Madagascar, Kyrgyzstan and Palestine, while Tecno is popular in West and Central Africa. Oppo, Vivo and Huawei lead in Indonesia, Bhutan and Togo respectively.
Hello, I’m a dedicated Apple user who came across this post on the “all” feed while scrolling. I know that I’m not really the intended audience of this community so if I’m not welcome to discuss here, feel free to tell me to get lost. I don’t want to impose.
I thought it might interest you a bit for me to share my two cents - just for context, I’m very technically competent, much more than the average smartphone user. Feel free to ask me anything. I am not a fanboy of anything in particular except Star Wars, so I’m not particularly inclined to get defensive - I’ll try my
best to stay objective and I’m very happy to talk about Apple’s flaws as well.
Anyways, with all that out of the way - my reason for continuing to to use iPhone isn’t because of marketing. I don’t buy it because I think it’s cool/trendy/whatever. I get it because I prefer the experience of iOS over Android. When I tried Android, I found it a lot harder to get things the way that I liked them, it generally felt like it needed a lot more hand-holding from me.
I definitely don’t feel scammed. I’ve been using iPhone since 2011 or so and I’ve been a Mac user since 2016 - most recently I feel like the Apple Silicon MacBooks are genuinely good value, but prior to that I would definitely say that Macs were relatively overpriced compared to Windows PCs. I feel like iPhone is priced maybe (~20% or so?) higher than a comparable Android device, but personally, to me, the price is absolutely worth the improved experience.
And I went from using an iPhone because eventually I couldn't do anything I wanted to on it anymore. I couldn't develop my own apps for personal use without jumping through stupid hoops, I couldn't customize my experience in any way that wasn't the approved Apple plan, the app environment was sparse (I know this has changed but it was terrible for years). I stopped being able to jailbreak them in order to give me a half-assed semblance of control over my phone.
Finally I gave up and moved to Android, around about 2010. No regrets whatsoever, and now I can install a privacy oriented version of Android on a lot of different phones, since it's open source (sorta). I can use other app stores like Fdroid for FOSS apps. I shudder to think what would happen if Apple were the only phone maker.
I live in Belgium. I think I count on 2 hands how many people I have seen with an iPhone, and I have a quite young workplace.
Surprising that apple is top. Literally every public place where you are where a phone rings or an alarm goes off, there is a 90% chance it is the default Samsung tone/alarm and almost everyone in the room immediately checks if it was theirs lol.
Major markets. The arrangement is whatever LibreOffice chose, which for some reason is reverse alphabetical order. Oh well, at least World comes first.
I don’t think this is accurate. It says Apple is the leading phone where I live, but the large majority of people here are too poor for an iPhone. Plus you rarely see people with them outside the rich areas of the city.
India has not frozen Xiaomi's assets as far as I know. They got a pretty big fine for tax evasion (they said they were paying the tax in China, but weren't, or something like that).
its attempts to stir up a China vs India culture war
All the viable alternatives to Xiaomi (Oppo, Vivo, Realme,, etc.) are also Chinese, so this doesn't really matter. Now these companies are challenging Xiaomi, but they're doing it by offering comparable performance to price ratio and better cameras. Also, Xiaomi has conceded to our demand to set up some local manufacturing. Low-end phones are now assembled in Chennai, Bengaluru and Noida, although the components are still imported.
Edit: First sentence is incorrect, as pointed out below.
IIRC, top 4 out of the 5 vendors in India were Chinese with the outlier being Samsung. Nothing also has a factory in South India(Chennai, I think) which is why their products are almost available in India from Day 1 but they don't have much market share.
The fact that almost everything in the northern hemisphere is apple phones it is fully incorrect like how Germans have less Iphones than most of eastern europe
Apple is leading in a lot of countries despite Android being the dominant OS, because the Android userbase is divided among different manufacturers. See China, for example.
But here is the thing the only phones people buy in eastern Europe is xiaomi and Samsung and pretty much the only ones with Iphones don't even live in eastern europe
Just use Signal. It's private and secure, available on every platform (including desktop), you can send photos, voice messages and all kinds of other files.